AlvinC

Depression is crushing. I haven't done any Zoom events. I was scheduled to do one as an interview for a personality YouTube channel as an INTJ, but then Dotti got sick and then she died quickly, so that was canceled; there was no way I was up for that then or maybe ever. I think maybe people, who are living their happy little lives as if nothing had changed, are a reminder of what was lost when our soulmate died. Suddenly they are living a different life, one that we have lost, and it is a reminder of that. I think the reason I look forward to going to sleep at night is that I can escape to Attis, my fictional paradise I began creating in 2016. I have many eras that I can run to and I will set my Kindle ebook reader up to read my stories to me and I am transported there, away from this dismal place, and there Cookie and Bill (metaphors for Dotti and me) are living happily together and their children are living out their lives. I have more than 100 years of Attis "history" to choose from and I can pick situations that match my mood at bedtime. It's running away, but I love it. If it weren't for that, I don't know if I could sleep at all. But then I wake up, back on Earth.

Gwenivere- Serious trauma can alter your personality for sure. For myself, it only drove me deeper into my INTJ isolation. But I can see how your natural extrovert tendencies could be squashed by this. And missing "that couple," which I was part of, is something I have been wrestling with too. Going to sleep is something I look forward to. Waking up, is not a happy time at all. I always wake up anxious, and it takes me varying amounts of time to come down to feeling almost normal. I can't seem to generate any feelings of anticipation for the future. I think the long term ones on this board, who are quick to reach out to others, are certainly wired to be good caring people. I am thankful you are all here.

Kay - Your post got me digging into this, and I just read this concerning INFJs (who have some profound overlap with my type, INTJ, concerning introverted intuition): Because of their ready access to subconscious or subliminal information, INFJs are commonly viewed as profound, insightful, and sometimes even psychic or prophetic. So, maybe you are an INFJ too.

Kay - I haven't run into a type called "prophet" yet. But then the names can be ambiguous, which is why I use the four letter codes to identify the types usually. Possible candidates are, the "Advocate (INFJ) or maybe the Logistician (ISTJ). I am not sure. All of the rational types (INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP) tend to value truth over friendship. There are a lot of videos on YouTube where someone takes all 16 personality types, and shows how they will react to different situations. Those descriptive stories your teacher used could be very entertaining because different types will approach things differently. I made a video on how to determine your type in case the tests were coming up with results that changed for someone, taking different tests, or the same test on different days. (A lot of those tests are written poorly, unfortunately. The context of the question is not fully laid out and many times the questions end up with and answer: "It depends." One day you might feel one way and another day you might feel differently and give a different answer.) Last year, I sat down with my two brothers-in-law and watched that video with them, and they came out ESFP and ISFP. There are YouTube channels dedicated to all the different personality types. Each type has certain strengths it can lean on and certain weaknesses that it needs to either work around or work on learning how to cope with it. I went into teaching specifically for that very purpose. (I didn't know about MBTI back then but I knew I was an introvert and people were a puzzle for me.) I volunteered for instructor duty in the Navy and they sent me to school to learn how to teach and then I spent most of a decade getting up in front of classes and teaching, and doing pretty well at it. Before I took on that challenge it seemed well nigh impossible for this naturally introverted hermit to face a roomful of people and lecture them. Dotti was able to go up in front of a group like it was the easiest thing in the world, she would ad lib it and thrive. Just one more thing about my girl, who was so different from me, that I greatly admired.

Kieron - that is the sad thing about pain: poignancy abounds. :-( Gwenivere - I am glad you found some MBTI sources. It appears that Advocates are very good at providing support on this forum. I guess that is not surprising, but you all have been helpful to me. My world was completely centered on Dotti. She was my source of creativity and joy in living. I made a video called "An INTJ Grieving the Loss of a Spouse" and many of my long time viewers expressed a knowledge that this was huge, earth-shattering for me, because I had spent years making videos where I sang the praises of my ESTP wife, and my love for her. Viewers often made comments that they wished they could find such a perfect mate. And now what? Where can I possibly go from here? At least my Saturday matinee is over for another week. A few days are ahead of just normal misery, instead of an intense session of misery on steroids.

Gwenivere- MBTI = Meyrs-Briggs Type Indicator There is are MBTI tests that help you to figure out your personality type. Not all tests are created equal, so you might need to take a couple of them to make sure they get it right. There are several MBTI related web pages with lots of info on the system. There are 16 personality types in that system and they are each indicated by a 4-letter code. INTJ, INTP, INFJ, INFP, ISTJ, ISTP, ISFJ, ISFP, ENTJ, ENTP, ENFJ, ENFP, ESTJ, ESTP, ESFJ, ESFP I or E: I is for Introverted, and E is for extraverted. N or S: N is for iNtuition and S is for Sensing T or F: T is for Thinking and F is for feeling. J or P: J is for Judging and P is for Perceiving. It goes on to stack your cognitive functions in order for you personality type. INTJ is Introverted Intuition—Extroverted Thinking—Introverted Feeling—Extroverted Sensing I could go a lot deeper on it, but only if you are interested. My YouTube channel is centered on the INTJ personality type but there are 15 other types as well. I got started on this a few years ago when my cousin suggested that I use the system to help me with creating characters for my fiction writing. But when I checked it out I became very interested in it for my own personality. It has helped a lot with the fiction too, but mostly it has been helpful to me to understand myself.

Sorry for repeating what you already knew. In a sense I was thinking "out loud," because I had to double check for myself. They have names for the different types and sometimes they are called different things on different web pages. The INTJ is called the Mastermind in many areas, but it is called the Architect on at least one of them. As you pointed out, every type has its strengths and its own weaknesses. Dotti had more than 84 million visitors her web page over the 22 years it has been up. She touched many lives. I always admired her talents and her drive. I adored her on so many levels. And now I am left with only old memories, because we won't be making new ones anymore.

Kay- An Advocate is also an INFJ, like Kieron. Perhaps that partly explains the ability to be here and reach out to others so well. I am built like a porcupine, with sharp quills all around, but in the middle is a warm fuzzy part that somehow Dotti was able to reach without being dissuaded by my quirky social inadequacies. She loved me as I was, and didn't try to change who I was. I still think of that as a miracle, because she was so very special and she just loved people. One of her members from her web page, when they met face to face said, "Dotti has a very special ability to make you feel like you are best friends when you first meet, and feel as though you have known each other all of your lives." That is the exact inverse of me. But she loved me anyway.

Kay - Thank you! That visit really helped me emotionally. Grandkids are a treat! I just got an email from my brother-in-law who said that since he has no children or grandchildren, he has enjoyed watching a YouTube channel that is showing a little 2 year old girl living on a farm and enjoying the vegetation and the little animals. Children bring a feeling of youth. They are curious and filled with energy. They tend to live in the now and savor each event. It is wonderful. In less than a month we will have the service for Dotti and it looks like we will have both my sons, their wives, and four of my five grandchildren all together. My oldest grandson is now 23 and working full time in Japan. The two grandchildren who are here locally are 9 and 5. Their birthdays straddle Dotti's. Grandson October 2, Dotti October 5, and Granddaughter October 7. The two coming from Japan are two and one in age. I got to see the older one, my granddaughter, when she had just turned 1 but I have yet to see my youngest grandson. Their daddy, my son, will turn 50 on his next birthday. He is going to be feeling very busy when those kids hit their teens. Unfortunately, my son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids in Japan are so far away I don't see them often, but it is a true joy when they come for a visit.

Kieron - Thank you for taking the time to respond and to share your thoughts. You have Introverted Intuition as well, so you probably get my discussions with my subconscious fictional character Staci Colt, who seems able to tap into that Ni part of me. After making around 130 videos on the INTJ personality type I am faced with the worst case scenario for me, and I am lost at sea with no compass or chart. I knew for years that dealing with my emotions was was my weakest area. But here I am. I did videos on how my ESTP wife drew me out of my shell and pulled me into social interactions that I never would have been able to do on my own. She was strong where I was weak, and vice versa, so that we made a complete whole when we were together. It was wonderful, all that I ever wanted out of life. But alas… I think one of the saddest things I have found in this forum—though not really surprising I guess—is the fact that people like yourself, who have been on this horrendous Journey for years are still feeling the pain. This forum is structured a lot like my wife's message board that she ran for many years on her web page. At it's peak there were over 30,000 members, but now it is all gone. It was a bit weird for me to join here after I was an admin on hers. She had a lot of people struggling with life as well (it was based on weight loss). But here we are struggling with death and trying to find a life after it has taken the one who made life wonderful for us. If I know any INFJs I am not aware of their personality type for sure. I know a few INFP's, and as it turns out one of them is a hospice worker as her job, but I met her through Dotti's web page, in the weight loss world. But she has emailed me some support since Dotti moved on. I have a cousin who is also an INFP, and she and I are very similar in our need for solitary time. I have never really been single since I graduated from high school. I got married that summer in 1970, to my high school sweetheart, and it lasted about 3.5 years before she left me with our little son. About 8 or 9 months later, when I was finally picking myself up off the ground, I met Dotti, and I have been with her ever since. I don't have a knowledge base to work from. I don't have a past history of being single where I am all on my own. I was in the Navy when my ex left and so I lived in a barracks and then on ship. But I was stuck being around people. Now, I am alone. If my son drops by or my grandkids come for a visit I see someone, otherwise I am a hermit. And about 90% of me likes it that way. (Although there is no one around to read it but me, there is a plaque on my office door that says, "Nobody gets in to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!" I hand wrote a little caveat to that, however: "Except for Dorothy!" My Dorothy has gone now and so there are no exceptions.) But there is this 10% part of me that wants to interact with people. That is probably why I do a great deal of writing emails to others and in part what drew me here.

Here it is, Saturday morning and in less than two hours it will all start again—the seventh weekly rerun—with my 5am phone call that shattered my world. It is like living through an episode of The Twilight Zone that never ends. The only good thing about this is I get a strange sort of release after 9:12am. Sitting all alone beside Dotti's dead body for an hour or more in ICU after she died was not the same level of horror that watching her die had been, and the grip of terror normally releases me then, and I am back to just being miserable again, like any other day. And years ago I used to actually look forward to Saturdays.

Gwenivere - I was reading your description of what you have gone through with Steve's belongings and it made me think of what my Dotti would have to go through if I had died first. I have five guitars, a banjo, a electronic keyboard, and enough hard drives to store the Library of Congress and even I would have trouble trying to sort out some of the old files on them. I never was very good with writing music but I have a bit of talent for writing words to songs, so I borrow melodies and write words to them. I have written a few for Dotti. I put a couple of them in videos for my YouTube channel with pictures of Dotti over the years, explaining to my viewers about how much she meant to me at the time I made the videos. There was no hint in my mind that I would be here today and those songs would be a tribute to the lost love of my life, rather than my living angel. I have been struggling with what to do about my apartment. We divided up the place, and I controlled my office and she had free rein in the rest of it. So, on every wall, on every shelf, everything was put there with Dotti hands. Her white tiger's head and a poster-sized picture of Multnomah Falls (where we had our first date) that we picked up on the other side of the country in a shop in New Hampshire and many photo frames (20, 30, 40 pictures per frame) are filled with pictures of our memories together. I walk by them everyday, all day. Her desk in the living room sits vacant, an empty reminder, with her organizer and photos on the wall beside it. I can't get the courage up yet to touch it. There is a huge cabinet with many shelves in one corner of the living room that has knick knacks—many shelves have various buildings for a Christmas village—and now there is a new addition there: Dotti's urn. She had a set of shelves beside that holding dragon figures that she loved, and another set of shelves on the other side with mermaid figures that she had purchased for me. Every place in the apartment is a shrine to Dotti and her ability to create a wonderful home for the two of us. The sharing you mentioned is huge for me. Dotti wasn't just my best friend but she was the only face-to-face friend I had in the world that I visited with regularly. When I wrote something I wanted to get Dotti's opinion of it. If Dotti liked it, my most important audience was covered completely. She lost her father when she was 7, and it was so traumatic for her she lost all her memory of that time. She had no memory of her father at all. So, I wrote her a "memory" a short story about when she was 7 and her father was a part of it, and she loved it. I could share anything and everything with her, and I did. As you pointed out, people have no clue about this pain until they experience it for themselves. I had a friend back when Dotti and I were living on Midway Island in 1977, and his wife lost a full term baby, and I went to play racquetball with him one time and we were talking and he said, "No one asks me about my son. How much he weighed, or how long he was." He was in a world all his own on his loss, because others were afraid to bring it up for fear of bringing him pain. They just assumed he wanted to put it behind him quickly and move on. Loss isn't like that. You would love to put the pain behind you, but you want to hold onto the love of your life. Dotti and I had a great deal of practice at dealing with being apart from one another. I was a year on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and then my last cruise, on the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67, was seven months long. (She was right at the front of the crowd of hundreds of wives waiting with the ship pulled in and was on the news that night running to keep ahead of the crowd as she headed to the gangway to wait for me to come down off the ship.) Navy schools could last 3 months, and the ship would go out for weeks at a time even when we were not on a cruise. I have over a thousand letters that we wrote to each other—one per day for every day we were apart—and one thing that is missing for this separation is the countdown calendar that I used to draw up so we could mark off the remaining days one by one as they passed by until we could hold each other in our arms once more. There is no end date this time. There is no number of days that can go by and then it will be enough and I will see Dotti again; this time is forever. No more sharing, no more jokes from Dotti in my email from her computer to mine. No more sitting in my office and hearing Dotti's sweet laugh when she saw something on TV that hit her funny bone. Speaking of which, I have a memory of back in 1979 or 1980 when we visited some friend in San Diego and we were watching a Muppets show in the evening and there were two puppets of old men sitting in a balcony box together and one of them said, "My wife's an angel!" The other guy said, "You're lucky. Mine's still alive." Dotti just laughed and laughed at that. I don't know why but it just caught her at the right moment in just the right way. Humor is odd that way. But that memory has bugged me for the past 6 weeks, because there is nothing lucky about your wife no longer being alive. My head is filled with that sort of debris. Things no longer make sense. Loose ends abound, and I am going in circles and getting nowhere most of the time. People sadly look at me with sympathy, without a true understanding of my problem. They see "loss of wife" but they don't understand "loss of everything of value." You don't just pick up the pieces and move on. There is nowhere to go.

Jim - In the ICU Dotti told me to not forget to have her cremated and for our plans to be carried out. We have agreed that was what we both wanted for years. What concerns me most is the worry that this will be just the same for years and years and that is so depressing. I don't know if I have that kind of energy. Yesterday I got a spark of hope when my 9-year-old granddaughter finally worked up the courage to visit Grandma's house without Grandma in it, with just her brother and Grandpa there for company. It was shockingly wonderful for me. For two hours I felt normal. All my stress was gone. Our son, always said that the girl has Dotti's personality and my brains. She is my first granddaughter and Dotti and I raised two sons, but no girls. I now have another granddaughter who is two but she lives in Japan and I have only seen her once. My point is that for just a moment, a window opened up into my dungeon cell and let the light in. Dotti was like your Nancy with people. She would be standing in line at a store and strike up conversations with anyone in line. She could walk into a room full of strangers and after spending some time there get to know them all. She had a few conferences that were organized from her web page and she would get up in front of the group with a microphone and have them all eating out of her hand. One time we were on a cruise ship and an illusionist who was entertaining a crowd where Dotti and I were sitting on the front row, made the mistake of handing her the microphone and she went with it in a big way. He rhetorically asked, her "Do you want to do the show?" I never knew what to expect with her. Dotti and I used to love to go to a coffee shop with our laptops and we could spend hours there together. My son bought me a gift card for Barnes and Noble for Father's Day, and I went there and walked around the store a couple of times, but I was out of the store before I realized that I had never once even glanced up to where the coffee shop was because Dotti and I had spent so much time there. Yesterday I watched a movie with my grandkids, and it was the first movie I could sit through since Dotti died. I can't watch her videos on her YouTube channel, it rips my heart out. I found your story about the plane turbulence to be interesting. I haven't flown in years. Starting in high school, where I went to a religious boarding school, I began flying routinely. (The school was 800 miles from home.) In the Navy had to fly a lot. In fact when I flew home to marry Dotti, in 1976, I put on more than 25,000 air miles on the round trip. Later as a civilian I still had to fly for my job for quite awhile. But I got to the point where I just didn't like flying any longer and so I quit doing it. Maybe now it wouldn't bother me any longer. What have I got to lose? I wrote a novel several years ago, and the lead characters were metaphors for Dotti and me. They were getting old and nearing death, but they didn't know that the government of the 23rd century had plans for them. They were taken in their sleep and their minds were uploaded into a computer and the process killed them both. Then ten years later their data was uploaded into android bodies. From the moment they went to sleep they didn't know anything was going on. To make a long story short a thousand years later the two of them woke up, apparently the same ages as when they got married (she was 19 and he was 22), and they were placed on a planet all alone except for a large contingent of robots who worked out of an industrial center. The point is, I saw the writing on the wall that we were nearing the end of our lives. However many years we had before us, they were going to be a lot fewer than the ones we had behind us. So, here was an out, an escape clause to the deplorable contract we all fall under when we are born. On their new planet of Attis they could live for as long as they liked together. No Grim Reaper following them around to do what happened to my Dotti. Dotti and I both used to modify the old Honeymooner's saying, "I love you to the moon and back," into "I love you to Attis and stay." One of my first thoughts after Dotti died was, "There can never be an Attis now." The idea of finding a way out, was gone. Not that there ever was much of a hope anyway, but still, the door was slammed shut and bolted and welded forever. There is a philosophical point to the status of things happening that are forgotten, sort of like the concept of whether or not a noise is actually made if no one is around to hear it. The difference between what happened, but has since been forgotten, and fiction, which never happened, has to be something. But what? I have toyed with the idea for some time. Is there a garment that holds all the events of all time in its pattern of weave? Did a dinosaur's struggle for existence failing, and the beast falling to the ground in death, rotting and disappearing into the environment, leave some sort of permanent imprint on something, somewhere? Do our lives create anything permanent at all? I don't know. But as long as I am alive, I know that Dotti and I did things, and enjoyed things, and suffered through things together, and all of that exists in my head, even if it exists nowhere else. It stinks having to face this day after day. It does help a bit to get it out there to look at and discuss it. For the first month I wrote a letter to Dotti every day. Then I stopped. (The Word file was up to just over 55,000 words.) It was all I had to look forward to at first but then it stopped helping. Then I started up a dialog with Staci, one of my later Attis characters and they helped a bit. But I still don't see any way out of this. And you are working on your third year of this. Now I know what one of those poor souls felt when they were locked up in one of those hanging medieval cages and left to starve to death so the birds can pick at their bones. There really is no way out. -Al-

Thank you Kay! It has been helpful seeing others who are going through this. (I don't think anyone has gone through it, past tense, because it seems like it is a never ending process.) I just keep taking the days as they come and try to fight my way through them. Yesterday my 9 year old granddaughter came for a visit for the very first time without her parents. She was very close to Grandma and seeing Grandma's house without Grandma in it any longer was too much for her. I was shocked by how therapeutic it was. It was the best I have felt in weeks. My stress just evaporated for those couple of hours until her dad showed up to take them home. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel normal for awhile. It was wonderful. That little girl is a lot like my Dotti was, the same personality type, and she is very intelligent. That is why they got along so well together. I really missed her the past few weeks. I have so little to look forward to any longer. I think being able to talk about Grandma was helpful for her as well.

Thank you JimJim. You nailed it. My wife got a little figurine for my office that shows a little girl in a dress holding a bunch of flowers and she is holding hands with a little boy with one hand in his pants pocket and the other holding her hand, and they had big eyes that are looking right into the other's eyes. The caption that is written on the base says, "There's Nothing We Can't Solve Together." There is little plaque on our bedroom door that says, "We may not have it all together, but together we have it all." We had a sign for above that door for years that said, "Honeymoon Lane." The honeymoon finally ended on May 29. The suffering still has a ways to go. But when I go, Dotti's ashes and mine will be spread over the water at the top of the falls where we had our first date. It was a beautiful outing for us both, nearly 47 years ago, climbing 700 feet into the air to get an amazing view of the Columbia River. That was always our place, and we climbed it many times since. We will only have one more trip ahead of us together to the top of the falls, and we will have to be carried that time, but then we get the E-Ticket ride over the falls. Dotti loved thrilling rides, so I know she would enjoy this one. I wrote a short story years ago, for my blog on Dotti's web page. Later I turned it into an audio book sort of thing for a video on my YouTube channel. I called it When a Goddess Calls. It was about a Greek man of Athens thousands of years ago and he took a walk out of the city and on the trail he encountered a goddess. She took an interest in him and offered to take him to Olympus to live with her. She was divinely beautiful and he desperately wanted to go with her, but he had the wisdom to realize that when she tired of him, he would be cast back into the dreary world once more and never again would he be satisfied with anything from his normal existence again. No woman could measure up to the goddess. Everything would be dark and dreary forever. So, he refused, and because the goddess loved wisdom she didn't strike him dead but instead blessed him. Little did I know when I wrote that story that I would be living the very existence that the man of Athens avoided, because my time with my goddess has left me here, where my sunshine is gone, and nothing has any joy or flavor any longer. I once told my dentist, when he had given me a Novocain shot that the universe has a physical law that I call "The Law of the Conservation of Pain." Novocain hurts when you are given it balance the scales for the pain you will miss. The highs are offset by the lows and in the end it is a wash. The highs feel so good that we seek them out but the lows then seek us out, and the scales are balanced. In the book Hero With a Thousand Faces, it is pointed out that all stories have the same ending, and it is an unhappy one. The happy ending is a myth because "happily ever after" will end in death. And we poor humans arrive into this existence with no one asking our permission to put us here, and we struggle as best we can, and then we return to the great nothingness from whence we came. In a thousand years, probably far sooner than that, no one will care about us or our joys and our sufferings. And it will then be as if we never were.

Dotti and I talked about names for a daughter if we had one, and I suggested Guinevere, in part because I loved the song by that name by Rick Wakeman. We didn't have a daughter so it became a moot point. I am an INTJ, in the Meyers-Briggs system of personality classification, and so was C. S. Lewis. That was why I was eager to read that book. He thinks in a similar way as I do, and as I read the book, I found exactly what I expected. He didn't pull punches about how he felt and his analysis of what was going on, especially in the first half of the book was quite refreshing. He died 2 years after writing that book and 3 years after his wife died, the same day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Lewis was 64 when he passed, just like my Dotti. I came to this forum after watching a video on YouTube where they were talking to people about going to grieving groups. I am an introvert and groups are not my thing. I avoided them before Dotti died, and that wasn't changed by her leaving. But I enjoy writing and reading (I usually write a few thousand words in email every day) and so I went looking for a forum. When I arrived here I started reading and found it was amazingly helpful. I was in tears a few times, which I had avoided the past few days pretty well, but it was a release that I clearly needed. My anxiety level dropped. So, I signed up. My natural way of dealing with things is to think my way through it. But it is not effective, and I discussed this in one of my YouTube videos on how to deal with a broken heart when you are wired like I am. In the video I was discussing the terrible pain I felt when my first wife abandoned me and took our 2-year old son with her. But when I made that video I had no clue that in just a couple of years I would be facing a far more devastating loss. No matter how much I think about it, it goes in a circle because emotions are not logical, or rational and there is no easy way out. I have to face the pain and deal with it. And I hate it. Every morning I get up and say, "Good Morning Dotti" to her urn, and every night I tell her goodnight. We had a little plaque in our bedroom that said, "Always kiss me goodnight!" That is a reminder, along with a million others in my apartment, that Dotti is no longer here. Years ago, we had different things going on during the days. She had created a huge web page and it took up her time while I was at work, and I was working on Ion Implanters in microchip manufacturing plants, and our evenings were our only time together, along with weekends. But for a number of years we have been together pretty much 24x7. Everyday was interwoven with Dotti, all day long. And now? An empty apartment and an empty life. Dotti was a people person. She loved people and she was the source of most of my social interaction with others. My natural bent is to be in my office all the time. I have to be prodded to get out of the house and do something. Dotti would prod me, as only she could. One more reason to miss her, along with innumerable others. Thank you for taking the time to read my posts and to respond, and share your experience with me. I wish you all the best!

I don't know if you will find this at all useful but I dived in every chance I had to be with my Dotti. I invested every second I could in being with her and doing things with her. I never took her for granted, but just like you I took tomorrow for granted. Her death blind-sided me because there was just no way she was going to die now. Not now. But she did. And all the time I spent with her didn't change the horrible pain I feel today, other than to make it worse because of the contrast of what I had before, with what I have today. There is no getting around the fact that loss hurts no matter what came before, and regrets only bring us pain, with no value gained. Thank you for sharing your story. I just found this message board today and it has had a very positive effect on me. I am not alone in this.

Imagine standing in line at a store and there is a large man in front of you whom you don't know. Suddenly he turns around and slaps you to the ground brutally and you are sprawled out flat on your face. In a store, you might stand up and throw some punches and give the guy a thrashing, but this, this is far worse. My wife died suddenly, just 12 days before our 45th anniversary. It was unexpected. And, there is no one to be angry at, no one to hit back. It's a blow from the universe that was perfectly happy to let an astroid hit Earth 65 million years ago and kill off the dinosaurs and many other animals. It would be just as happy to let another one take out all of mankind as well. It certainly didn't, in its infinite apathy, care about the loss of one woman, who was my everything. I thought I knew just how much I loved my wife, and how much I truly needed her. I told her every day that she was my everything. But thinking it and saying it, is not the same thing as facing it in all its cruelty. I am face to face with the fact that she was essential to my happiness. I didn't just want her, I truly needed her, and now she is gone. And here am I, contemplating the futility of this thing we call life. I found the perfect mate, the love of my life, the one with whom I wanted to spend all of the rest of my days, and I felt like the luckiest man who ever lived. But the higher you climb in this world of emotions, the farther you have to fall when your soulmate is taken away. On the upside I did experience a very wonderful life with my wife, and honestly it would be worth any price to have her in my life. I just didn't know that the price I would pay would be this terribly high. I feel like the Tin Man, because Dotti took my heart with her when she died.

My best friend from high school (I graduated 51 years ago) sent me a sympathy card that said, "No one has the perfect words to make your sadness go away, but may you find comfort in knowing how many people wish they did." I have spent far too many days being knocked around by a sea of pain and confusion, trying to make sense of it all, and words unfortunately can't change that. After 6.5 weeks of this insanity I am somehow still alive. I have my two sons and five grandchildren to thank for that, because I knew for me to check out and follow my wife, as I so desperately wanted to do, it would cause irreparable harm for these loved ones. And so I am still here, trying to find a path I can walk to get back to sanity somehow. I can honestly say that one thing that this experience had given me is a complete loss of fear about any terminal illness; bring it on.

I lost Dotti, my wife of 45 years, minus 12 days, on May 29, 2021 to pneumonia. It came on suddenly and unexpectedly. We both got sick, but I got better quickly. Our son and his family all got it as well. My wife’s brother caught it and everyone got better fairly quickly, no worse than a cold. But Dotti didn’t get better. Every Saturday morning is when I face another time to relive the events. I talked with Dotti on a video chat on Friday and she sounded like she was hanging in there in ICU, with her BiPap mask feeding her oxygen, and then at 5 am I got a call from the hospital saying that Dotti was too tired to continue breathing with the mask and she refused to be intubated. They said I could come in and see her. That was a drive I am surprised I was able to conclude safely. I got to ICU and they showed me to her room. She had such tired eyes but she told me she loved me and we shared things that only two people who have grown into one can share. Then they gave her some meds—she said, “I don’t want to feel any pain, please”—and then they removed the mask. I stood beside her, desperately wanting to put that mask back on her, and have a second thought about it, but I held her hand and rubbed her forehead and watched my lovely angel breathe her last breaths and her heart stopped at 9:12 am. This is my Saturday matinee now, as I go through it each week all over again. The seventh rerun is coming soon. Ever since she died I have been lost, all alone in a dark valley, where Dotti used to be the sun in the sky, and illuminate green fields and beautiful lakes and flowers that would dance in the morning breeze. She was the purpose to my life, my best friend, my confidant, my soulmate, and in very many ways, my reason to be. Making Dotti smile was my goal, and much of my day was aimed at accomplishing that. If she were asleep, I would check to make sure her covers were alright. If she were awake I would check to see if she needed something. The thing I lived for each day was our date each evening together for dinner and watching an old Perry Mason show, or a movie. We played hangman on our Roku as well and she was a great partner for figuring out the words. From morning to night, my day was structured around Dotti, and I never dreamed she could be taken so soon. I will be 70 next month. I used to talk about average life expectancy and I would say time was getting shorter for me, and Dotti would get angry with me for even thinking about that. But she was 5 years my junior. The very first birthday card I got for her was on her 18th birthday, and I wrote on it, “No matter how old you get, you’ll always be my youngin’ ” . It was my way of saying that I was robbing the cradle, and we laughed about it right up until the end. I have gone to my doctor to deal with the anxiety, on top of my horrible grief. I have thousands of pictures, and innumerable memories and now, they are all that is left me. Just simple things have become almost impossible to do. Hard things have become impossible. Making videos for my YouTube channels on any topic other than Dotti is impossible. I can’t watch her videos on her channel without falling into sobbing. My son bought the C. S. Lewis book, “A Grief Observed” for me, because it was recommended in one of the comments on my grieving video I had made, and he read it, and asked if I would like it. The first time I went through the book I scribbled fast and furiously in the margins as I sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed with Lewis’ ideas. The second time through I read all the things he wrote as well as my own margin notes. Right now I am struggling with creating a video for Dotti’s memorial service and that means going through our 10s of thousands of pictures from over the years and picking out just a select few (150 or 200) for the video. On some days I just can’t do it. We had so many fun events and magic moments over our four and a half decades together, and the pictures bring me back to them as I get into one after the other. Dotti is gone but her incredible talent for making life wonderful is banging around inside my head as a reminder that she is no longer my source of joy and living each day. In the book, “Foundation,” Isaac Asimov had one old character say, “Past glories are poor feeding,” after he had meandered into his past during a conversation. Few people care about what you did yesterday, because they are living in today and looking to tomorrow. But I feel as though I have lost my tomorrows, and today is only as tasty as cardboard. My yesterdays, thanks to my Dotti, is filled to the brim and overflowing with happy events and joyful times together. I am still trying to puzzle out what to make of such a mess. I have gone so far as to create some written discussions between myself and one my fictional characters from one of my books. (It may sound crazy but I had to try it.) She is a rational, intelligent thinker, who can wrap her mind around big problems and find solutions. This is by far the biggest problem I have ever faced and “the two of us” are still working on trying to solve it. Writing is a great way to work through things, and right now I am willing to try almost anything to get away from the horrible pain that has rushed in to fill the hole that Dotti left in my heart, when she left me in the ICU. Oh how I miss that girl!