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Fire

I'm sitting here at my desk , 100 miles away from where the fires have done their damage in the last five days, and yet my eyes burn from the smoke, and my lungs struggle to breathe more than usual.  But more so than any of that, my heart hurts like never before.  I look at pictures of the charred ash residue of what used to be a neighborhood in Santa Rosa.  The people that did not get out in time were essentially cremated in place, with fires raging so hot, it melted the aluminum wheels on their cars (aluminum melts at 1000ยบ+F).  And still the fires rage on, hungrily consuming everything and anything in its erratic path.  Jumping over the 6 lanes of divided highway that is US 101, over tops of hills that used to provide a modicum of delay, racing into populated areas and devouring neighborhoods like sapling trees in a forest. They are using a 747 jet converted into a fire plane to drop fire retardant onto areas not yet destroyed.  And even that seems li...
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six years

  Ken died six years ago on Friday (25th). It's hard for me to believe he's been gone 72 months. Somehow, it seems both longer and shorter than that. Ian and I were both numb that first year, our goal simply to not lose any more ground than we already had. It took all our effort simply to stay where we were emotionally.   After the first year, we decided we would take a step forward. Not a bunch, but just one, and maybe look around the corner. We'd both been going to individual & group therapy, and were beginning to get used to this whole “just the two of us against the world.”  Ian learned that mom had done a whole lot more in her life than teach him and be “mom”. I learned that I was going to have to have him help me, but I had to be careful that I didn't put Ken's responsibilities on him. I won't say we thrived, but we survived.  Slowly, the new normal set in, not comfortably, but tolerable. Ian graduated from high school and went to RIT. My hous...
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The Face of Depression

A little over a week ago , I stood in the dim light of my bedroom, shaking my head.  Disorganized jumbles of junk lay strewn across any available hard surface, Across the floor, a two-foot high by four-foot long pile of dirty laundry was expanding into the closet, and the floor was gritty from kitty litter having repeatedly been tread into the room for I don't know how long.  Dirty tissue balls laid haphazardly beside my side of the bed, which hadn't seen fresh sheets since the new year, and clean clothes lay crumpled on top of the other side of the bed. An overflowing wastebasket finished the scene. I didn't dare open the curtains - someone might see the pigsty my private space had become.   I turned around once again, and sighed quietly to myself, shaking my head.  "This is what the face of depression looks like," I thought, then started to do what I could to shovel some of worst of the trash into a paper sack before the deep cleaning housecleaners showed up. ...
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