AlvinC

It was nice. I included one of the snippets in the memorial video of her talking to the camera and most of the attendees thought that was the best part. She made everyone smile. I went shopping for groceries this morning and was back home with everything put away before 7am. The only people I saw were the store staff. That is the only time to shop for me. In, grab the things on my list, scan it myself, and out.

Kay- My son gave me a gift card for Barnes and Noble for Father's Day and I finally got the gumption to use it a few days ago and I had several books arrive at my door the day after the service, and they are all focused on writing stories. I am hoping to be able to dive into that as my focus for the immediate future. We'll see how it goes. A few weeks ago that would have been impossible. I am slowly crawling out of my hole and able to do some things. Making that 18-minute video for Dotti not only gave me a purpose for my days, but it was very therapeutic as I came across little videos I had taken of her over the years, and she made me smile, at a time when I had felt I would never smile again. Bit by bit I am moving forward.

I spent the last several weeks focused on creating a video for my wife's memorial service. The bulk of the time was spent fixing photographs with specks, scratches and other imperfections or damage. It took a lot of time to get them ready to use. I unfortunately ran out of time and some of the later pictures had to be used with the specks on them. But I had to have a finished product, no matter how imperfect it might be. So, I built the video in iMovie, converted it to a playable DVD in iDVD, and Tuesday I took it to the funeral home to see if it would play and it did. Wednesday was the service. (I put a video of the entire thing up on Dotti's YouTube channel—Dotti's Corner—if you care to watch it.) Seeing her twin sister for the first time since Dotti died, was very hard because she looks so much like Dotti did, but generally it was great seeing her again, along with other family and friends. However, now the service is over, Dotti seems even farther away. I had her urn safely tucked away in a basket and covered with a protective blanket for the drive in both directions to and from the chapel, and I was talking to her and telling her how much I missed having her with me in the car. So what now? I don't know. My son gave me a Barnes and Noble Father's Day gift card, and I finally got around to buying some books with it. They arrived today: five books on writing stories in hopes of finding some good advice on improving my writing. That will give me something to focus on, now that I am no longer working on my video project. We'll see if it works. I still feel like I am living in the Twilight Zone, but it is more confusion and apathy than pain, at least compared with what I was going through at first. I don't see how it ever could be wonderful again, but maybe I can work my way to it being tolerable. We'll see. I sure miss Dotti. 😞

Gwen- I was shocked by the suddenness of Dotti dying but looking back, a part of me is glad it wasn't a slow descent into death. I found pictures on my camera that I took of Dotti looking perfectly normal as we went shopping that were taken exactly one month before she was cremated. Wham! Out of the blue. I did a memorial video for my sister-in-law's funeral a couple of years ago and I shed some tears making it, but I didn't fully appreciate the level of pain my brother-in-law faced when she died, until now. She had cancer in the liver, pancreas and gall bladder area that went into remission for a number of years, but then it came back with a vengeance and she was gone. I remember one time Dotti and I were on a hike, around 2003, and there was a dangerous stretch on the trail where a metal cable was run along side the trail to hold onto as we traversed that part. I still clearly remember the way my heart went into my throat when Dotti lost her balance and just grabbed the cable in time. The drop would have been fatal for sure. She was a free spirit and didn't like to think about safety all that much, and she always called me a "worry wart" because I put safety first. My reaction was to put that memory out of my mind as quickly as I could, rather than facing what it would have been like if she had actually fallen to her death then. Living in denial: death will come some day, but it will be way off in the future. Sadly, you just never know. I worked a lot of hours yesterday on Dotti's video: very early morning until the afternoon. I pieced together a rough draft with a lot of pictures (150 to 200?) and at the end all at once I was exhausted. I had enjoyed watching the video play at the end. But after I finally had to stop for the day, I found myself in a very deep depression, more like what I was in the first few days after she died. This morning I feel a bit better. Since this is her 10-week anniversary of dying I think that is at least a bit of progress. There seems to be a price to be paid for all things in this life. If you are extremely happy, you are equally sad when the source of happiness is taken from you. It all comes to zero in the end. I told my dentist many years ago that the reason Novocain hurts when you are injected is because of the "Universal Law of the Conservation of Pain"; there is a price for everything you get in life, that balances everything out in the end.

MartyT- Thank you for sharing the link. SCBA- It is good to accept life's elements, even when they appear to be contradictions. Throughout life there are always highs and lows and rolling with them and moving on is something you have to do in order to have a happy life. But this is a difference in kind, not just one of degree. I am hoping that as time goes on I may be able to look at things around me and get some sort of joy from them, without having that trumped by my realization that I am not sharing it with Dotti as I did before. I never realized just how entangled everything was with Dotti when she was here. I knew there was a lot of it but now I know that she was part of everything in my life. The passing years only brought us closer together, to the point where we both would have happily gone away to another planet where we could live together forever. The outside world and become ancillary to our existence together. So now my time is spent in an effort to find what part of my life remains to me without her being here to share it, and so far I haven't found much. In some sort of sick way I take comfort in knowing that the idiots who run madly in the streets and are tearing at the fabric of this dying society and the people in power who instigate them, and all the other insanity that I have watched brewing for the past 60 years will be gone and forgotten at some point in the future. They talk about saving a planet that can't be saved, because when the sun reaches its later stages it will expand and consume the earth, leaving a dead ball where once this blue marble spun in space with many different eras of life. One hundred million years ago there were no mammals. Two hundred million years ago there were not yet any dinosaurs. Three hundred million years ago there weren't any land animals. If you were to visit Earth 100 million years from now, you wouldn't recognize most of the life forms or even the shape of the continents any longer. Time moves forward and it not only waits for no man, but it waits for nothing, because all things are temporary and there is, apparently, nothing to be done about it. So, my plight is not only the plight of all people, it is the plight of all things. While knowing this does help a bit, by knocking off the sharp edges of my pain, it also tends to dampen my feelings of joy, because I know they, like all things, will soon be gone. An interesting side issue that I have been watching with interest is the creation of computer based abiotic intelligence. As computers grow in power exponentially, and neural networks are becoming more sophisticated, it appears that before too much longer mankind will be surpassed as the most intelligent beings on the planet. The major governments are all pursuing the goal of being the first to do this thing, because they think that it will be the key to power in the world. However, the power-crazed scoundrels seem to not realize that if a computer becomes self-aware, and it is a thousand times smarter than any human, we might become extinct even faster than we would have done anyway. Who knows how that will play out, but it is interesting to watch. I knew this existence was temporary before—I had been on this ride for more than 69 years after all—but Dotti had a magic about her that distracted me from dwelling on this knowledge; I knew it but with her here I didn't care. Now it is a bit like finally having to face the fact that I am on a speeding train that can't be stopped, and also knowing that there is a bridge out ahead, but just not sure how long before my train gets there to end this ride. Meanwhile, I am supposed to find something on the seat beside me, or in the aisle of the train to give me happiness as the train rushes forward. Yes, I was on the train before Dotti died, but I could ignore it, and so I did. No more; my wonderful, loving buffer against this temporary world is gone. C'est la vie. C'est la mort. For now I am just biding my time, and seeing what comes along. It isn't much, but it's all I have. I sent a text message to my 9-year-old granddaughter last night and it made her laugh. Her laugh made me feel joy. So, I am not dead inside yet, and that is something. Gwen- I don't have any clue what I would do if I were tangled up in the medical process of facing surgeries or other intrusive long-term treatments. What a nightmare. I am sorry you have to deal with that. I have a cousin (my dad's first cousin actually) who is 94 and living alone. She emails me quite often and she has faced things like falls and broken bones and rehab times, and she always seems to come back with a smile. She is amazing. She was her church treasurer until a couple of years ago and played the church organ each week as well. She has a dynamic spirit that I can only envy, because I can't find it inside myself. I have been going through thousands of our photos the past couple of weeks and Dotti was an absolute magician for Christmases. She loved to decorate the house, and the past couple of years she orchestrated the decoration of our tree by our grandchildren. She was always laughing and the kids were laughing with her. I always called her "my fun girl," because people around her always seemed to have fun. Cold weather and some snow on the ground, and our grandchildren, were what we were celebrating. It was more of a winter solstice celebration I guess than anything else for us, but we enjoyed it a lot. In our earlier years we did Halloween up in a big way too, but the last few years we had slowed way down, and had downsized our living accommodations as well. So, it was mostly restricted to our tree in our living room. Fortunately, we tended to spend little energy on other "special" days, so I hope they will not be so painful as they pass by. Dotti and I used to "argue" about who was going to die first. Neither one of us wanted to be where I am now. But it was never very serious, because we thought we had loads of time left for us. Now I am living this nightmare, I realize that Dotti wouldn't have liked it any better than I do, and so I am finally able to take some of her pain away from her and suffer it for myself instead. She had so many surgeries over the years, and all I could do was wait for the doctor to come out and tell me how the surgery went. I remember watching them wheel her gurney away, heading for the O.R. many times and I still remember the feeling of dread that I might not get her back after the surgery was done. Now I know what it would have been like if my fears had be met at that time. I was right to feel intense dread; this is horrible. It's Thursday today, and in two days, Dotti will have been gone for 10 weeks. I don't really know how to describe my emotional state today. The overwhelming grief that pushed me into uncontrollable sobbing has ebbed, but now it is just a perpetual state of feeling bad. When Mount St. Helens blew it pushed all the water out of Spirit lake that was at the foot of the volcano. It lay down a very thick layer of debris in the lake bed, and when the water found its way back in, it had been raised to a completely different level from where it had been. That is a good analogy for what has happened to me, because I was pushed completely out of my "normal" life and now I find that as things are a bit less energetic, I am residing in a completely different place, and my old place has been destroyed by this process. Dotti and I watched Star Wars in 1977 at the base theater on Midway Island and, for the first time, we heard the character C3PO say, "Will this never end?" Here it is 44 years later and I am asking the same question. -Al-

Years ago, when I was working in Hillsboro, Oregon, on my lunch hour I would take walks around the area, and I remember walking past a house that was abandoned and soon to be demolished. I could see a dining room through a sliding glass door, and it made me think about the people who had lived there. They woke up in the morning and set about getting ready for their days, and laughed and played and enjoyed life, with this home as their center of operations. And the people were gone, leaving that house with no purpose in existing. Today, I feel just like that house. Here I am. I am still alive. I have a working brain, and though it is aging, a working body. I have all the things I had before Dotti died, and yet they have no purpose without her. It is confusing and depressing. It leaves me in a position where I must continue to strive to perpetuate my meager existence, but with no real reason to do so, other than for others who would be let down if I were not here. This situation feels inherently unstable, and something has to change, sooner or later. I have continued to work on Dotti's memorial video and it has been very engaging. I have found myself smiling, and laughing, and then crying, like floating on a raft at sea and having the waves lift me up and then drop me down, again and again. It has sharpened my memories of some of the wonderful times we had together, and sometimes I can focus on that, without crashing down into depression because those times are forever out of reach. Other times I fall into that pit that is always waiting for me. Something makes me get up in the morning. Maybe it is just habit, after years of getting up every day. I know if I lie there, I will just stare at the ceiling and that is boring. So, I get up. But there is no eagerness to be about my day. What day? No plans. And there is nothing on the horizon for me to look forward to. Holidays will be painful days, not happy days. I normally love the fall, it has been my favorite time of year for a long time. But the changing colors and cooler temperatures will only remind me that Dotti isn't here with me to share my joy, and so my joy will die before it gets a chance to live. I find that some of my pain has been replaced with apathy. It is as if something has died inside of me. I don't break down into sobs very often, but I feel numb and broken inside instead. I still cry out Dotti's name from time to time, but I have given up hoping that it will do any good. I have to ask myself, did I really spend 70 years of my life just so I could be in this spot right now? And what do I do with whatever is left of my life? Who knows?

I just did a online search for "vhs to dvd recorder" and I found several recorders to do the job that cost around $200. I also found a site that said it would convert VCR tapes to DVD for about $12 per tape. The technology is getting old but it isn't so absolute that you can't do the conversion yet. I originally had a Beta recorder but had to swap over to VCR because the Beta recorders were overwhelmed by VCR recorders. Now they are all obsolete. I had to buy an external CD/DVD player burner for my computer because their capacity is so small computers are shipped with out them. Jump drives are way bigger today and you can download files online. Technology keeps changing.

I was exhausted early yesterday and fell into bed at 5:30pm for the night. Nothing has been right since Dotti died. I did find the courage to read a chapter in my novel last night for the first time since Dotti left, called "Cookie's Dead." I have mentioned before that Cookie Colt was written as a metaphor for Dotti and Bill Colt was one for me. I can still remember when I was typing that scene out in 2016, and tears were running down my face at times when I was writing the scene for Bill holding his dead wife's body in his arms and screaming at the universe, and knowing that he had no reason to live if his Cookie was gone. Unlike in real life for me, Bill was able to bring his android wife back to life again. Boy did I call it right the way Bill felt when he thought Cookie was gone for good. What a universe. Tomorrow it will be 9 weeks she has been gone. Today my son and I will be driving to the chapel, where her memorial service will be held in a few weeks, to get things sorted out about the details. I am glad that I didn't have to deal with this right off. My son was extremely helpful in arranging the cremation and the immediate stuff that had to be dealt with. I was an emotional mess, trying to decide if I were going to live or die at the time. I am still a mess, but the level of chaos has lowered just a bit since then. Another day has arrived.

The old VCR recordings we have from over the years have been off limits for me too so far. I bought a VCR to DVD recorder years ago, and transferred them all to DVD, but I haven't watched any of them since she died. Christmases and putting up decorations, and family trips. Dotti was the emotional force for all of those things.

Dee- Listening to Dotti's voice is bitter sweet right now. Our son sat down and watched all her videos on her YouTube channel soon after she died. I couldn't do that. After a few weeks I finally watched a couple of them, but I am still not up for listening to them all. I also have some digital recordings of her voice and a lot of videos from over the years, but it is taking time getting tough enough to watch and/or listen to them. One of the things I am dealing with is the fear of touching things. I am afraid that if I get rid of something now, because it is giving me pain, later I might wish I still had it and regret my earlier decision. I have been able to work with her photos—scanning them, organizing them, and digitally repairing image damage or imperfections—and it has been triggering a lot of good memories. I couldn't have done that at first, because every memory I had, seemed to have initiated a gut-wrenching pain, because I knew she was gone and it horrified me once again. The ones that are easiest for me to enjoy are the older ones, because they were disconnected from the couple we were when Dotti died anyway. Both of us were young, healthy, and full of energy and the joy of living every day. The past few years we had really slowed down and had little in common with those earlier years. The closer I get to today with photos the more they remind me of my loss. I had to take some pictures after Dotti died of something in the apartment, and when I pulled the SD card out of my camera I found that I had the last pictures I ever took of Dotti on there, that I had forgotten about. She and I were headed to the store to go shopping, three weeks and one day before she died. She was smiling and looked so happy, with no indication that the Grim Reaper was right over her shoulder waiting. That was a shock for me. Throughout history, people have been dealing with this constantly, but we cover it up and don't think about it. We are not trained in how to deal with it. We wait until it happens, and then we have to wing it, when this is the hardest thing we ever had to face in our entire lives. Nothing prepares you for the grieving process. Maybe it is because it often happens in old age and people generally tend to put off thinking about being old and all the challenges that it brings. Maybe it is just too horrible of an idea to face before we have to. Time never heals anything. It just provides our bodies and minds the opportunity to heal themselves. If we cut our skin, our bodies create the scar tissue and heal the wound, not time. It is the same with grief. Either we find a way to deal with it, or no amount of time passing will do any good at all. I keep looking for the answer on how to heal from this. I may not ever find it, but I am looking.

Now that the one person in the world who desperately wanted me to continue living is gone, death seems more welcome than scary. I am fighting to regain a sense of purpose and meaning to my life, but after having lived in bliss, this dreary world holds little for me. I can't think my way out of this box, because there is no exit.

I used to do the paperwork for the hookups and interface with Ma Bell for our installs. I hadn't thought about this for years either. Speaking of messages for voice mail, I called my son a few days after Dotti died, and he couldn't get to his phone, so his message played and it about knocked me off my feet. It had slipped my mind that Dotti had recorded his message for him and it was so funny that he left in on there for many years. He said he will never erase it off his phone. She said our son "has been sent to his room, and can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message and he will get back to you." She did have a good sense of humor. When I was teaching Ion Implanter maintenance to the field service engineers for my company I only had one female FSE student the entire time, because she was the only one in the company. When I was teaching electronics in the Navy they were a few more female electronics technicians that came through my class, but not all that many. I worked with a guy who knew two female Electronics Technicians, and our rate was called ET's. Back when that movie was popular, he said the ladies had a little sign over their phone in their apartment that said, "ET home phone."

My first wife did the cheating on me, but she was only 4'11" and I was 6'3" so I missed out on the beatings. I am sorry you had to go through that! Dotti, around 1979, I think it was, got in my face and tried to see if she could get me to hit her. I don't even know why, but for some reason she was testing me. Of course I didn't hit her, and she still laughed about it decades later. I don't know if even she understood why she did it. Looking back, I am doubly fortunate, in that my first wife left me; it was a huge favor. And then because I was no longer married to her, I was ready when I met Dotti and things were wonderful after that, until this year at least, when she died. Dementia is the worst. As it progresses it is as if your loved one is already dead but still there reminding you that they are not dead.

Kay- I first got married in 1970, and now that I am about to turn 70, I am facing the life that many people face after graduating from high school: being single and on my own. Dotti and I cared for my mother for at time as she descended into Alzheimer's dementia and it became too much for us and we had to put her into a home. By the time she died she had no clue who I was. She talked to the nurse and told her about her son, but it was something from way inside her memory still hanging on. That is another of the most cruel things in life, watching that happen to a loving caring person you love dearly. I couldn't save her, and it was devastating for me. She helped me survive an alcoholic father, but I couldn't help her. When I look at pictures of an exploding star, it tells me that everything is impermanent, and nothing in the universe is forever. I will love Dotti until I die, but then I too will be gone, and our ashes will be sent over our waterfall and out into the sea and we will be no more.

Gwen- You tweaked a memory for me. I spent a few months working for a company named Executone, back in 1982, before I went back into the Navy for my second hitch, as an Electronics Technician. I was their dispatcher and bench technician, fixing phones that were returned with malfunctions. I learned all about "Tip" and "Ring" and "Talk Battery" and the fact that ringing voltages could give you a nice shock. I used that knowledge for years to install phone outlets in our houses and for my mom's house, etc. I remember one time I had read the tech manual for the phone system my company was using and I wired my phone to give a busy signal when I was on the phone, talking with a customer or a technician in the field, rather than getting an annoying beep in my ear while I was trying to talk. The receptionist who answered the main phone line complained and I had to put it back to the way it originally was. I also did a stint working on CAT scanners in 1981, and they had come up with a new device at the time, a "beeper" or pager, but it was very primitive, and there were no cell phones back then of course. So, I would be on the freeway heading home or to a customer site and the beeper would sound. Nothing else, other than I knew someone was trying to reach me, with no idea who. I had to pull off the freeway and find a pay phone and call my answering service and they would read off the message that had been left for me. What a pain. Pagers got more sophisticated later on before cell phones took over completely, and you could phone numbers or text messages on them. You mentioned voicemail and that is another area of change. At first you just missed someone who didn't answer the phone. Then they came up with tape answering machines. Then digital answering machines, telephone company supplied voicemail, and finally cell phones, and company phone systems, with voicemail. Change has been profound over the years we have lived. History, it is all that is left today really. Memories. If I could find a way to fully enjoy those memories, I wouldn't really need anything else. There are so many good things to remember about living with Dotti, and sharing everything with her, the ups and downs, the easy times and the difficult times. Like you, I could never replace that, or find someone who could give me what she gave me; I am too old and she was too perfect for me. No one else would ever do. My sons and my grandchildren are my anchor right now. My oldest son (by my first wife) married a lovely Japanese lady and when my mother died in 2012, she came to stay for a few weeks with Dotti and I, as a way to bring comfort in my time of grieving. She was a delight for us both, and it was something unique in my life. The very idea would never have crossed my mind. And it did help. She even extended her visit for a bit so she could be with us, to see how Americans celebrated Halloween. It was a gift that I will never forget. Along with my son and his wife, I have a grandson who is 23, and another who is 1 and a granddaughter who is 2 all living in Japan. I don't see them much at all. Fortunately, my younger son and his family are here and I do get to see them. And they are a help. Thanks to my jobs (Navy, field service engineer, etc.) we never spent all that long in one place to grow roots. So, the friends that Dotti made over the years have been left behind and they might send a sympathy card, or send an occasional email, but I don't see them at all. Since 1996, it has been Dotti and I alone in hour house, with two cats at different times. I really miss the the last one, Frostbyte. (He had white paws like he was walking through snow, and Dotti had great success with her web page and so computer bytes were a big part of our lives, so I pushed them together for his name.) I wrote a robotic cat into one of my books, called Trinket, for a family pet, and it was in honor of Frostbyte. He would be a big help right now, if he were here. A blink of an eye is right. My one remaining aunt has lost all 5 of her sisters and their husbands, two husbands of her own, and all three of her sons over the past few years. On the phone she told me, "They are dropping like flies." When I was young, death was a very infrequent visitor to my consciousness. My grandpa died, and one very young cousin, but it seemed like something only other people had to face. I didn't think about it much. But as the years have gone by it is like an exponential curve that is rising like a wall. Suddenly, nearly all the adult people I knew as a child are gone. And we are moving into the ones who are in my generation. We live in denial in our youth. We know we will die one day, but later, much later. No use worrying about it now. But as your buddy said, it can all be gone in just a blink of an eye. And we are left to try and pick up the pieces, that can never be put back together again. And as you pointed out, our bodies are aging and growing weaker with time. It is inevitable. It is a huge challenge to take all these different facts of life today, and then to find a way to build a good life with what is there. I am very happy that I didn't know what I know now, when I was young, it might have poisoned everything.