Ed and I totally dysfunctional until some healing takes place. He got stir crazy, so I said I would go along with him to the Ellenton mall where there is a discount Saks he loves, and that would get him out of the house and distracted. So we did that. It’s a 90 minute drive one way, so it took up the day.

There were some teens there, really beautiful girls – long legs, great hair, short shorts, perfect skin. I did not want to be them. It’s interesting how we just grow up with who we are and before you know it, we wouldn’t want to be anyone else, no matter how perfect. And as is sometimes the case with uncommonly good looking people, they were full of themselves and their movie star looks. No, I would not want to be them. Maybe they will grow out of the peanut brain phase.

Coming home late in the day to a house without Brunswick Kitty in it was so sad, we couldn’t bear it. But we’ll have to. No way out.

About a month ago I posted an essay written by Frederick Pohl, the late sci fi writer: The Man Who Gave Me His Wife. That reference was to Jay, my late husband and the wife was Carol to whom Jay was married before he knew me. I read this on Pohl’s web site and there were comments about it at the end. One was from a Hollywood writer, a friend of Fred’s (younger, of course – he must have been a phenom at an early age because he has a lot of credits) and he asked Fred “whatever happened to Jay”. I looked him up on Facebook and asked if he was the same fellow who had made the comment. Well, he was, and he wanted to know all about Jay. So I wrote a lengthy piece about our life together from 1956 to 1993 when he died, and sent it to him.
He sent a quick reply that he had skimmed it and loved it and would read it more carefully after he finished with speaking at a conference he was attending.

My mini bio was full of anecdotes. It appears my eidetic memory is still working. Jay used to say he would celebrate me “in song and story.” It is, for me, saddening that instead I am doing it for him. Maybe it is wonderful too, but sad because some people should never, ever die. We don’t make the rules, but I’ll have a thing or two to say about that if there is anyone to talk to after I pass. My mind is open to possibilities, despite my fulminations about religion. Basically, it is not belief I quarrel with but the way it is used to impose a set ideology on others. In any case, none of us, believers or otherwise, have a choice. Would you like to go into nothingness, or would your rather see your loved ones who are already there, looking down and loving us from their misty home on a distant cloud? And are our wonderful pets there with us? How lovely. How unknowable.

xx, Teal