My husband's 61st birthday was May 20, 2009. It was his last birthday.
I'll have to back up some. In 2008 we bought what we jokingly referred to as The Redoubt. It's a house. It's a 2009 square foot house with an open plan downstairs, a loft around the stairwell upstairs and bedrooms and bath leading off the loft and hallway, as well as a master suite and bath which are as big as our previous apartment. I shit you not. I have now got a Tony Hill Gazelle, a honking huge pair of Twin XL Leggett and Platt electronic elevating and collapsing frames with Tempurpedic mattresses connected to a ginormous teak or something Vietnamese sleigh headboard, three monster dressers, a desk, a MONSTER of an apothecary chest serving as a fourth dresser, three bookcases, two rocking chairs, a reading table 3 feet across with chairs, lamps out the wazzoo, and you can still hold square dance practice in there. The closet to that room is bigger than one of our former apartment bedrooms, and the bath has a tub that is so seldom used, it'd make a whopping good planter, except that the bathroom is an interior room and there's no window for natural light in it. You can sit in the shower to bathe and most people would or do.
Anyway, it was NOT the house of our dreams after 8 months of looking for land on which to build or put a triple wide manufactured home (there wasn't any, it was all covenanted such that no land with stubbed water and sewage from one border of WA state to the other W. of the Cascades is available for such a thing) or a house within our price range, from inherited money. We found one 60 miles north of where we were living, a neat brand new house, no former resident. The price was doable and we paid for it. Outright. Hey, at 60 or just on the verge of it, a mortgage is just pouring interest money down a goddamned hole. I knew if we didn't buy this one, Erek would pout and sigh and snipe until I bought a hurricane split, a house with a living room on one level, half a story above it the kitchen, the two baths, a large bedroom (the master, with NO walk-in closet, just one wall of shallow closet with *mirrored sliding doors which made the room look smaller and feel like an apartment rental that had seen better days. The windows were tiny. Down a full story of stairs was an UNFINISHED basement with stubs for washer/drier and freezer, a blank space for a bathtub next to a toilet with no wall around it, no sink and then a room with 3 of 4 walls more or less done, including one "wall" which was sliding glass doors to a weedy huge back yard and an itty deck off the kitchen's breakfast/dinner nook with no stairs to the fenced in yard from the deck. The front yard was huge. The garage was at basement level with room for a pair of cars, a the freezer and laundry an a smallish work room for serious saws sanders, etc., for a guy of course and storage space for yard tools, mower, edger, etc.. I'd have to find a contractor to finish the house which could cost upward of 40K not included with the house cost, I'd have to landscape and do the yards, because Erek claimed allergies. I'd have to drag the vacuum up and down 3 stories to clean... Mention "hurricane split" to me and I immediately think of sucide. Seriously.
This house was not what I wanted . To get mail you have to walk almost a round trip mile to the kiosk -- no post boxes allowed, the houses are full sized homes, but less than 25 feet between them -- in this state that makes them "detached condominiums" which is bullshit. However it means no mail privacy... No excuses.. disability and age irrelevant, blah blah blah. The kitchen island is a fucking mess, there's no pantry, insufficient storage for me and food prep after putting spices and machines where i can get to them - well food prep is 1 square fucking foot. I shit you not.n I can manage, but a lot of people would go completely bugfuckingnuts. Stove is a glass flat top because I flatly refused to dismantle and clean one more heat source well whether gas or electric 11 years later I have clean black burner top that is not scarred, chipped or covered with burned food. I can cook a well with the flat top as most foodies do with gas. Nyah nyah... the freezer is in the garage. I WANTED IT IN THE PANTRY. I have no pantry. The dishes are on a pair of stacked collapsible book cases. Nothing is where I wanted it. The living room is tiny, but no one visits so who the hell cares?
Erek refuse to let me put solar on the roof or A/C in to make the bedrooms livable and workable, as his office was in one of the other two bedrooms -- and we roasted, even with fans.
I put in solar the spring after he died, and had A/C joined to the forced air gas/electric heat that came with the house. I also had the boiler removed and a hot water on demand heater installed also. The solar more than pays my electric bill. It generates enough electricity the utility company is required by federal law to buy that my property taxes are also paid. Thus I only have gas, water/sewage/trashcollection bill to city and bundled single car and home owner insurance bills to pay. and on SS and a bit of savings I intended to get by for a long time..
I still hate this house, but I have a treaty with it, I maintain it and I can live here with the two cats; and it won't fall down on my head... so far so knock wood .... hard.
This is the place from which we intended to pass our elder years, from which Erek could work until he retired, etc., etc., etc. And for a year, of frantic unpacking, placement, lugging of barrows of crushed rock for a postage stamp back yard, of breaking down boxes never to be used again, of racing hither and yon for stuff we didn't have from years of apartment living, it was our heaven on earth. WRONG. he got kitchen to office meal service, coffee on demand, and he never did a fucking thing to maintain the house, not even dust or take the trash to the curb for pickup every Monday. He ran no errands, wanted nothing to do with any neighbors, spent all his spare time online with kinky friends, mostly women he mentored (cold fury was building when the roof fell in on us -- and I had an appt. with an atty about divorce and hanging on to the house, I had a prenup to protect my one time inheritance which bought the house -- the appt the day of his birhtday which I did not keep and never rescheduled.)
Two blizzards, well snowstorms with significant accumulation, back to back last winter just at Christmas/NYrs, we had it made. The house was stocked, we had no power outages, the freezer was full, I shoveled the driveway once, took photographs by the bazillions, but it was a hoot. So what if we were snowed in for 10 days? Cakewalk. Erek worked from home. I slogged his lunches upstairs, he came down for dinner. We retired together, got up together, got the mail together, I explored the itty town we moved to but he had no interest in it, no urban feel to the town, he never visited the library I didn't have a kindle, so I went once a week and came back with 10 or 11 books and read them within a week, the cats had room to run and windows facing every direction. They were cool with their 4 cat trees, stairs, loft rail to vulch from. I felt trapped, Erek had his online pals and half the time we didn't even watch TV together after dinner -- and on his days off, he went online and stayed there unless there was a movie he wanted to see. I now had room to make art and STILL he would see me pick up a sketchbook or a camera and he just HAD to have something or have me fetch him something. He never did a load of laundry, never even picked his clothes up off the floor or put the dirty ones in a hamper I'd drag downstairs to the mudroom where the builder put the goddamned washer-dryer hookups right inside before the door into the garage. I did it all. He was king in a one-serf castle. He loved it.
But last Christmas 2008 Erek's neck began to hurt. I mean REALLY hurt. Occasional painkillers from old Viet Nam war injuries to his back weren't being consumed occasionally and slowly, so he bit the bullet. We decided we'd pay the extra 300 a month for better insurance through his firm starting in January and see our old doc, whom our previous insurance wouldn't allow.
By March 2009 he was in agony. He went back to Illinois/Ohio and visited his family and went to a small SF con business meeting and came home feeling punk.
Neck, still. And he was losing weight.
We got him into his doc's office, but SHE wasn't there a couple of weeks before his birthday. This male NP who was shirty to me, referred him to UW sports medicine. Appointment on his birthday.
So by then, his arm is going numb. He's having trouble lifting it. On his birthday the guys at the specialty clinic in downtown Seattle take a look at his arm on MRI, which he could not lie flat long enough to complete, and his spine is wrapped in 3 places with up with tumors; to which they allude, trying not to freak out, and they insist they must do surgery in the morning. These two young docs were arthropedic sports medicine fellows, second year of three each. They were gray at the gills and had a really REALLY shitty time making eye contact with him and when I force one of them to look down into my eyes, he teared up, while the other guy spoke to me about agent orange and tumors and how the Army admitted the Air Force had sprayed the border between Cambodia and Viet Name with agent orange but the NAVY (and Marines) denied it, so his having been Navy, the NAVY would deny to the VA and our insurance that agent orange did anything to his body. They said their boss would be in the following morning, they'd called him and he said to schedule Erek for 10 a.m, surgery, admit him immediately, a meal right then (5 pm. but nothing solid by mouth after 10 pm.) I got a call at midnight up here in Marysville to pick him up or he'd take a 67 mile cab ride home. I hauled ass, got there and the floor nurse tried to physically restrain me from helping him dress. Erek just stared silently at me and looking at his face, I took a risk of being jailed for assault and got him into a wheelchair and took him to the garage bundled him into the car I'd sell within 1 month of his death, drove home as if we were sneaking through enemy territory and the next day I got our doc, who didn't want him to come in, to find us an oncologist (neither of us had seen the CD with the images the MRI managed to capture before Erek panicked and in severe neck pain could no longer lie flat. Off to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance for a formal death sentence, which they tapfuckingdanced him around for 32 days, never did a thing but Rx enough painkillers to fell a herd of wildebeeste, and NEVER EVER LET ME HAVE A COPY OF THE IMAGING OR LET ME SEE IT, WHICH WAS A VIOLATION OF HIPPA AND MY MARRIAGE CONTRACT AS WELL AS STATE AND FEDERAL LAW, and they turfed him out 72 hours before he died, to avoid having his death on their morbidity hospital report, goddess, damn those motherfuckers. I rented a hospital bed, an oxygen concentrator for him, made a hospice home visit appointment, and we went to a hair place and got matching cheapass mannish short short hair cuts, because somehow Erek thought this asshole at SCCA wa going to give him chemo... no way, the doc KNEW it was the tail end of stage IV and home hospice would hide him from their failure.
It did. 45 minutes after I signed the contract for Home Hospice and the contract nurse and her trainee had left me with a nurse's aid for help with Erek, he quit breathing.
On June 22, 2009, at 2:03 p.m., my beloved husband, the man to whom I made and from whom I extracted a promise of 40 years of marriage at age 47, ceased to exist. On this level. He was now with Kittipuss, several cats of his I never met, several cats of mine he never met, a few dogs including the one which one of his drunken stepfathers had taken out and stomped to death, his late father who was murdered in Seattle 16 years before he and I married and whose killer was never identified or found or punished, and all the other souls he or I had ever loved, including my late father who might have liked him but told me that he wasn't the right guy for me because in the end he didn't respect me nor I him any longer
In spite of the unfit, I "grieved" until about 2015 or 2016. One day I got up whenever I got up and I didn't feel guilty for not having a sad-on and no longer blamed myself. And most importantly, I started drawing and got out the pastels and did something Erek had PROMISED me I could do when we moved in with one another and THEN deliberately sabotaged my doing the entire time I was with him... MAKE ART. I bawled for three reasons....1) My skills sucked after so many years unused 2) At 67 I felt robbed of almost 2 decades I could have been painting, taking class after class and improving AS a working artist (something I doubted I'd ever become then); and 3) My sadness had NOTHING to do with grief for Erek .... but FOR MYSELF.. and I felt free free free and there was a glimmer of joy under those tears....
On May 20m 2009 Erek got a "happy birthday motherfucker, you're a dead man," and on June 22, he left. He didn't want to leave but as he said, "I'm sorry, but I've outlived my fucking warrantee, Baby. I didn't intend for this to happen."
He was a nice guy. we weren't a good fit. One of the other women he met a woman who gave one of my cats a kitten for the cat's Christmas present and who idolized my husband but had too much honor to bust us up which In retrospect, I wish she HAD done, Mary, was a far FAR better fit.
I ran away from my mother to be with Erek. She was hell-bent on smothering the life out of me. That's a rotten reason to marry. A very very VERY bad reason.
I'll have to back up some. In 2008 we bought what we jokingly referred to as The Redoubt. It's a house. It's a 2009 square foot house with an open plan downstairs, a loft around the stairwell upstairs and bedrooms and bath leading off the loft and hallway, as well as a master suite and bath which are as big as our previous apartment. I shit you not. I have now got a Tony Hill Gazelle, a honking huge pair of Twin XL Leggett and Platt electronic elevating and collapsing frames with Tempurpedic mattresses connected to a ginormous teak or something Vietnamese sleigh headboard, three monster dressers, a desk, a MONSTER of an apothecary chest serving as a fourth dresser, three bookcases, two rocking chairs, a reading table 3 feet across with chairs, lamps out the wazzoo, and you can still hold square dance practice in there. The closet to that room is bigger than one of our former apartment bedrooms, and the bath has a tub that is so seldom used, it'd make a whopping good planter, except that the bathroom is an interior room and there's no window for natural light in it. You can sit in the shower to bathe and most people would or do.
Anyway, it was NOT the house of our dreams after 8 months of looking for land on which to build or put a triple wide manufactured home (there wasn't any, it was all covenanted such that no land with stubbed water and sewage from one border of WA state to the other W. of the Cascades is available for such a thing) or a house within our price range, from inherited money. We found one 60 miles north of where we were living, a neat brand new house, no former resident. The price was doable and we paid for it. Outright. Hey, at 60 or just on the verge of it, a mortgage is just pouring interest money down a goddamned hole. I knew if we didn't buy this one, Erek would pout and sigh and snipe until I bought a hurricane split, a house with a living room on one level, half a story above it the kitchen, the two baths, a large bedroom (the master, with NO walk-in closet, just one wall of shallow closet with *mirrored sliding doors which made the room look smaller and feel like an apartment rental that had seen better days. The windows were tiny. Down a full story of stairs was an UNFINISHED basement with stubs for washer/drier and freezer, a blank space for a bathtub next to a toilet with no wall around it, no sink and then a room with 3 of 4 walls more or less done, including one "wall" which was sliding glass doors to a weedy huge back yard and an itty deck off the kitchen's breakfast/dinner nook with no stairs to the fenced in yard from the deck. The front yard was huge. The garage was at basement level with room for a pair of cars, a the freezer and laundry an a smallish work room for serious saws sanders, etc., for a guy of course and storage space for yard tools, mower, edger, etc.. I'd have to find a contractor to finish the house which could cost upward of 40K not included with the house cost, I'd have to landscape and do the yards, because Erek claimed allergies. I'd have to drag the vacuum up and down 3 stories to clean... Mention "hurricane split" to me and I immediately think of sucide. Seriously.
This house was not what I wanted . To get mail you have to walk almost a round trip mile to the kiosk -- no post boxes allowed, the houses are full sized homes, but less than 25 feet between them -- in this state that makes them "detached condominiums" which is bullshit. However it means no mail privacy... No excuses.. disability and age irrelevant, blah blah blah. The kitchen island is a fucking mess, there's no pantry, insufficient storage for me and food prep after putting spices and machines where i can get to them - well food prep is 1 square fucking foot. I shit you not.n I can manage, but a lot of people would go completely bugfuckingnuts. Stove is a glass flat top because I flatly refused to dismantle and clean one more heat source well whether gas or electric 11 years later I have clean black burner top that is not scarred, chipped or covered with burned food. I can cook a well with the flat top as most foodies do with gas. Nyah nyah... the freezer is in the garage. I WANTED IT IN THE PANTRY. I have no pantry. The dishes are on a pair of stacked collapsible book cases. Nothing is where I wanted it. The living room is tiny, but no one visits so who the hell cares?
Erek refuse to let me put solar on the roof or A/C in to make the bedrooms livable and workable, as his office was in one of the other two bedrooms -- and we roasted, even with fans.
I put in solar the spring after he died, and had A/C joined to the forced air gas/electric heat that came with the house. I also had the boiler removed and a hot water on demand heater installed also. The solar more than pays my electric bill. It generates enough electricity the utility company is required by federal law to buy that my property taxes are also paid. Thus I only have gas, water/sewage/trashcollection bill to city and bundled single car and home owner insurance bills to pay. and on SS and a bit of savings I intended to get by for a long time..
I still hate this house, but I have a treaty with it, I maintain it and I can live here with the two cats; and it won't fall down on my head... so far so knock wood .... hard.
This is the place from which we intended to pass our elder years, from which Erek could work until he retired, etc., etc., etc. And for a year, of frantic unpacking, placement, lugging of barrows of crushed rock for a postage stamp back yard, of breaking down boxes never to be used again, of racing hither and yon for stuff we didn't have from years of apartment living, it was our heaven on earth. WRONG. he got kitchen to office meal service, coffee on demand, and he never did a fucking thing to maintain the house, not even dust or take the trash to the curb for pickup every Monday. He ran no errands, wanted nothing to do with any neighbors, spent all his spare time online with kinky friends, mostly women he mentored (cold fury was building when the roof fell in on us -- and I had an appt. with an atty about divorce and hanging on to the house, I had a prenup to protect my one time inheritance which bought the house -- the appt the day of his birhtday which I did not keep and never rescheduled.)
Two blizzards, well snowstorms with significant accumulation, back to back last winter just at Christmas/NYrs, we had it made. The house was stocked, we had no power outages, the freezer was full, I shoveled the driveway once, took photographs by the bazillions, but it was a hoot. So what if we were snowed in for 10 days? Cakewalk. Erek worked from home. I slogged his lunches upstairs, he came down for dinner. We retired together, got up together, got the mail together, I explored the itty town we moved to but he had no interest in it, no urban feel to the town, he never visited the library I didn't have a kindle, so I went once a week and came back with 10 or 11 books and read them within a week, the cats had room to run and windows facing every direction. They were cool with their 4 cat trees, stairs, loft rail to vulch from. I felt trapped, Erek had his online pals and half the time we didn't even watch TV together after dinner -- and on his days off, he went online and stayed there unless there was a movie he wanted to see. I now had room to make art and STILL he would see me pick up a sketchbook or a camera and he just HAD to have something or have me fetch him something. He never did a load of laundry, never even picked his clothes up off the floor or put the dirty ones in a hamper I'd drag downstairs to the mudroom where the builder put the goddamned washer-dryer hookups right inside before the door into the garage. I did it all. He was king in a one-serf castle. He loved it.
But last Christmas 2008 Erek's neck began to hurt. I mean REALLY hurt. Occasional painkillers from old Viet Nam war injuries to his back weren't being consumed occasionally and slowly, so he bit the bullet. We decided we'd pay the extra 300 a month for better insurance through his firm starting in January and see our old doc, whom our previous insurance wouldn't allow.
By March 2009 he was in agony. He went back to Illinois/Ohio and visited his family and went to a small SF con business meeting and came home feeling punk.
Neck, still. And he was losing weight.
We got him into his doc's office, but SHE wasn't there a couple of weeks before his birthday. This male NP who was shirty to me, referred him to UW sports medicine. Appointment on his birthday.
So by then, his arm is going numb. He's having trouble lifting it. On his birthday the guys at the specialty clinic in downtown Seattle take a look at his arm on MRI, which he could not lie flat long enough to complete, and his spine is wrapped in 3 places with up with tumors; to which they allude, trying not to freak out, and they insist they must do surgery in the morning. These two young docs were arthropedic sports medicine fellows, second year of three each. They were gray at the gills and had a really REALLY shitty time making eye contact with him and when I force one of them to look down into my eyes, he teared up, while the other guy spoke to me about agent orange and tumors and how the Army admitted the Air Force had sprayed the border between Cambodia and Viet Name with agent orange but the NAVY (and Marines) denied it, so his having been Navy, the NAVY would deny to the VA and our insurance that agent orange did anything to his body. They said their boss would be in the following morning, they'd called him and he said to schedule Erek for 10 a.m, surgery, admit him immediately, a meal right then (5 pm. but nothing solid by mouth after 10 pm.) I got a call at midnight up here in Marysville to pick him up or he'd take a 67 mile cab ride home. I hauled ass, got there and the floor nurse tried to physically restrain me from helping him dress. Erek just stared silently at me and looking at his face, I took a risk of being jailed for assault and got him into a wheelchair and took him to the garage bundled him into the car I'd sell within 1 month of his death, drove home as if we were sneaking through enemy territory and the next day I got our doc, who didn't want him to come in, to find us an oncologist (neither of us had seen the CD with the images the MRI managed to capture before Erek panicked and in severe neck pain could no longer lie flat. Off to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance for a formal death sentence, which they tapfuckingdanced him around for 32 days, never did a thing but Rx enough painkillers to fell a herd of wildebeeste, and NEVER EVER LET ME HAVE A COPY OF THE IMAGING OR LET ME SEE IT, WHICH WAS A VIOLATION OF HIPPA AND MY MARRIAGE CONTRACT AS WELL AS STATE AND FEDERAL LAW, and they turfed him out 72 hours before he died, to avoid having his death on their morbidity hospital report, goddess, damn those motherfuckers. I rented a hospital bed, an oxygen concentrator for him, made a hospice home visit appointment, and we went to a hair place and got matching cheapass mannish short short hair cuts, because somehow Erek thought this asshole at SCCA wa going to give him chemo... no way, the doc KNEW it was the tail end of stage IV and home hospice would hide him from their failure.
It did. 45 minutes after I signed the contract for Home Hospice and the contract nurse and her trainee had left me with a nurse's aid for help with Erek, he quit breathing.
On June 22, 2009, at 2:03 p.m., my beloved husband, the man to whom I made and from whom I extracted a promise of 40 years of marriage at age 47, ceased to exist. On this level. He was now with Kittipuss, several cats of his I never met, several cats of mine he never met, a few dogs including the one which one of his drunken stepfathers had taken out and stomped to death, his late father who was murdered in Seattle 16 years before he and I married and whose killer was never identified or found or punished, and all the other souls he or I had ever loved, including my late father who might have liked him but told me that he wasn't the right guy for me because in the end he didn't respect me nor I him any longer
In spite of the unfit, I "grieved" until about 2015 or 2016. One day I got up whenever I got up and I didn't feel guilty for not having a sad-on and no longer blamed myself. And most importantly, I started drawing and got out the pastels and did something Erek had PROMISED me I could do when we moved in with one another and THEN deliberately sabotaged my doing the entire time I was with him... MAKE ART. I bawled for three reasons....1) My skills sucked after so many years unused 2) At 67 I felt robbed of almost 2 decades I could have been painting, taking class after class and improving AS a working artist (something I doubted I'd ever become then); and 3) My sadness had NOTHING to do with grief for Erek .... but FOR MYSELF.. and I felt free free free and there was a glimmer of joy under those tears....
On May 20m 2009 Erek got a "happy birthday motherfucker, you're a dead man," and on June 22, he left. He didn't want to leave but as he said, "I'm sorry, but I've outlived my fucking warrantee, Baby. I didn't intend for this to happen."
He was a nice guy. we weren't a good fit. One of the other women he met a woman who gave one of my cats a kitten for the cat's Christmas present and who idolized my husband but had too much honor to bust us up which In retrospect, I wish she HAD done, Mary, was a far FAR better fit.
I ran away from my mother to be with Erek. She was hell-bent on smothering the life out of me. That's a rotten reason to marry. A very very VERY bad reason.
