Margm

Bittersweet is the word. Billy had a beard since the early 1970's. I look at his sweet babyface before that beard, but I loved the beard. I loved/love Billy. It is the same for us all. I look forward to the day that seeing their pictures will not be bittersweet, but will be what they were/are, beautiful memories. Sometimes the wound closes, but sometimes it is just ripped open again. Peace Butch.

I read other people on this forum's last moments. I think about my denying Billy the luxury of dying. I got angry he was giving up. Then I think and can even hear him say "Don't you know I see the worry in your eyes." That was all I would allow. He knew me so well. That was all that really needed to be said. He was me and I was him. One day, I hope this sad movie quits playing.

We were here first. He left me where we had lived. We were planning on leaving together. He passed away in one hospital I had retired from. I could not go back there. I could not stand to drive by the hospital. I feel the young Billy the Kid in this area. It was his home before we met and our home, our children's home, our graduations, our marriage, births of our children, their graduation, our life. The other place was his death and I would not stay. He is in my heart here, the reminders are happy. The school I was going to where he used to come for lunch with me, they have fixed it now where it is not a bad reminder. It is used now. At first when I saw it after all these years, it looked so vacant, like my life. Now it is a place for people to go for food, for free. I cannot say life is good. It will never be good like it was, but I am surviving. The cardinal I saw on our anniversary, I have not seen again. I have to feel it is a sign. This morning there was a Carolina Wren on the railing. Nothing significant, except they follow me where ever I go. They sound so happy with their song that is terrible. Reminds me of myself singing. Terrible, but they are singing their happy song. I do not feel happy. I have to try to let myself be happy. So many hooks in me trying to drag me down though. I know this is common ground to all of us.

My "sign" is just in black and white, a big white board with the words in block letters. Not as pretty as yours, but the message is the same. When I saw it, I had to have it. The words are the truth in black and white or whatever color, the message is so true. No hesitation, the sign came home with me and I don't even know what the monetary cost was, it didn't matter. I love the true message. Also, the wooden urn looks just like his. I had one picked out that was wooden and had a tree engraved on it with a message. I wanted it but they said it was one that was to be used to scatter his ashes. But, the funeral home said they could have it engraved in the wood on top. It says: A limb has fallen from our family tree that says grieve not for me. Remember the BEST TIMES, the LAUGHTER and the SONG, and most of all the good life i lived while I was STRONG. When I was packing to move, Billy's urn was the first thing I got ready. I put it in the space behind the seat of the extended cab in the truck. It sat there for two days while we were packing. I told Scott that I hated to leave Daddy in the heat. He said "Mama, think about what you just said." Sometimes reality has a way of hitting you smack in the face.

We did grow old together, but I never felt old until he left. I love the picture and happy times.

I have that sign I put behind and above Billy's urn. Happy Anniversary and I love the tattoo.

I have "Calm." I listened to it last night, or at least I started listening to it. These are all on my Kindle with earbuds. I cannot handle those things over my ears. I was a transcriptionist for nearly half a century so am used to all kinds of ear contraptions and always preferred the earbuds. It is a wonder I am not deaf. I have these others: Sleep Pillow, Sleep Well, Relax and Sleep, Relax Meditation and Calm.. I had others but there was one man and one woman that kinda got on my nerves. Maybe they were just "too cutesy." Now for white noises, Relax Meditation has noises you can mix, music, about 5-6 Kindle pages of noises. Even a hair dryer. I like the Native American music, drums, flute, etc. I don't remember much about "Calm" because I slept. Not ready to give up the Xanax. And, there is always Tylenol PM. They say that you can absorb this stuff even after you sleep but I think the amphetamines did something to my brain back in the early 1970's. (Prescription !!!!) and the residual speed built up a shell around the brain that stuff bounces off and falls out my ears, or goes down the spinal cord and the Myralax takes care of what was supposed to be absorbed. Anyhow, good luck with it. I really did learn how to do it one time, and that was after the 1970's, but this time the shell around my brain has fossilized.

I have the earbuds in my ears, almost immediately my brain shuts down. Voice still going in the ears. Hope I catch subliminal because otherwise no response. My two kids are bipolar. Both are vampires. Sleep days, awake at night. Says their minds won't shut down. Maybe plugging up my ears makes my mind shut down. (Might be the Xanax). You reckon?

Karen, I am so sorry about your daughter. You get a double whammy and sometimes life just does not seem fair at all.. My heart is with you.

I called it my magical-mystical imagination. I used to believe in everything. Billy was a skeptic He always said I was him and he was me. Alas, he took my magic with him when he left. Now, my daughter has a star that she talks to, talking to her dad. It is the more yellow star, bright. My mama was talking to Billy. Kelli asked her where he was. She said "he is standing right beside you." Now, I have to say that shook Kelli up a little. I want my magic back, but I also call it faith. When I was coming back from Walmart I came around the "back way" where there is not much traffic. I just happened to look at a church that used to be a Mormon Church. It now has "Faith Restoration Church" written on it. I wonder? "Here's your sign." .

I think people that can be this thoughtless do not have a version of "OK." I think they just don't think, and after they say it they don't even remember saying it. They will not understand until it hits them. And, most likely, it will hit them at some point. I made a terrible remark to my friend when her husband passed nearly 20 years ago now. After I said it, I knew I had said the wrong thing. I did have a chance to apologize and she, being the wonderful woman that she is, she scoffed it off as nothing. I cannot believe I said that to her. A thinking person, they know when they have said something wrong. An unthinking person has not a clue. There really are people like that in this world that we meet every day. They are actually a dandelion that the wind can blow whichever way it blows, and then are no more.

Actually Steve, you mediate nicely. To meditate requires concentration. When I had cancer I could still think. Now, even though I write short stories on here, I cannot concentrate to meditate. It requires too much work, too much thinking. In the meantime, I will keep trying. My new app has a picture of calming waters. Someone started talking, my mind shut off immediately, so meditation helps me because it shuts out worrying thoughts. But, I was not meditating and subliminal messages have not reached my shut off brain, but the worries and useless thinking did stop. I got eight hours sleep. Katherine Hepburn used to sleep 14 hours a day. I used to like waking up.

Honestly Patty, when I had cancer I had just turned 40. We did not have apps, we had tapes. I bought three tapes from our LSU Bookstore on meditation, they were a set and back then $35 was a lot to pay for them. The kind of cancer I had made changes that were hard to put up with. Billy put up a hammock between two trees at the lake house. I would listen to them and I really, really got to where I could place myself on a cloud over a blue lagoon and imagine I could feel the tropical breezes never once thinking about falling out of that cloud into the blue lagoon and not being able to swim. We were taught to think of the good blood cells eating all the bad cancer cells like Pacman, which was popular back then. I tried this. I tried sitting on the bed and repeating a mantra and learned to lock the door because Billy thought it was terribly funny. I had panic attacks and was trying to cure myself. I also had a therapist, a psychiatrist I saw for a very long time. Being my age, you can be pretty sure if it is out there, I have tried it. But, nothing ever hit me like this. The cancer treatments and fear were a walk in the park compared to this. Again, my heart is with you. It is hard to give up something you love so much and we had to give them up. I do not know why. I guess we just cannot all live forever. I figure if my mom and dad had been married as long as Billy and I were, one of them would be in the loony bin somewhere, and I don't think it would have been Mama. We do what we have to do for ourselves, and like Steve said (I repeat a lot of what Steve says), sometimes you need the right tools for the job. Again, my heart is with you.

I've tried it Patty. The first few weeks I would get in the RV and scream into pillows. I was in such terrible pain, but the pain of screaming was bad too. It hurt my head so bad, but I tried it a couple of times more. So, if I am gonna live, and it looks like I am for a little while, I prefer to not have that physical pain. The mental pain is bad enough. Maybe if I was a younger age it might not hurt my head so bad. But, it didn't bring him back either, so I quit it. Total frustration. My heart is with you my friend. I understand. We keep getting stuff added on. Today was my daughter and granddaughter's birthday. My sister was worried she was having a heart attack. So, I spent the evening calling her. Of course she cannot leave Mama alone and go to the ER because I am in the big city. Finally she said she took two Alka-Seltzer and had relief of the chest pressure. She chain smokes and is 65. She has the care of my mother on her 24/7. Now, I am going to take a Xanax and put earbuds in my ears and listen to a new meditation app. Wish for miracles. I wish for miracles for us all.

My friend (for all our school years and still), has had spirits/ghosts/bothersome creatures now for years. These are the same haunts. I don't know what to call them. She goes to bed each night reading her Bible. She moved from her old house to a new one she had built to get away from them. Billy did not believe in this while he was alive. I wonder if he does now. My son, after coding on the operating table twice believes it opened a portal because he has been visited by them when he lived in the old buildings that were speakeasy's from the 1920's, the old buildings in downtown Hot Springs, AR. He worked there and lived above where he worked. My friend, when she moved, something she moved brought them with her, so she did not get rid of them. She has had priests and other religious people come in and all kinds of people that work with the paranormal. They cannot get rid of them. There are a lot of things that happen that we do not understand. I could not live in that big house I lived in with Billy. I am fine where I am. Now, the 300+ pound fellow that lives above me, I do hear feet hit my ceiling at 4:00 a.m. This sound, when it wakes me up, somehow I find comforting. Karen, I don't know what I would do. I do know what I had to do, I did it, but it was not easy to move. I can talk/type all day but I have no answers. Gin, she is still hanging in. She is making urine now and her vital signs are good, but she is drugged most of the time and her eyes are slightly open. I saw her tonight and my sister told me she wanted to warn me before I went in there, but she drinks Coke floats through straw in the morning and asks for them. I have seen her mostly when she is out of it. My daughter had her talking this afternoon before I got there. Her little brain just hangs on. Sometimes life is cruel. But, we all know that.

I don't remember my dreams.

Gin, just google "Grief Brain." We are not any of us different. I don't get around people except family much, have to go Saturday with a bunch of women I graduated with. I think I will come away depressed because they have all gotten old and I don't look in mirrors. I don't know what words of wisdom I will get, but the majority of them are already widows. I will just tell them the truth. No, I am not okay. I am just keeping on, keeping on. But I will be happy around them and since Billy and I never attended class reunions (one of his), it will not bring back memories of anything but high school. Billy and I attended schools at opposite ends of the parish we live in. We will drive up there, three of us together. One is totally deaf, so it will be almost silent. Not looking forward to it or dreading it. It is what it is.

Again, as with Gwen, I agree with you 100%. When my dad was suffering so from the cancer, my mom wondered why terminal patients could not be prescribed heroin. (I hope I spelled that right). If it would help the mood of someone dying, in some cases, in rare cases, they might even overcome the disease. Of course, physicians would not prescribe this. But, I believe in using tools also. Sometimes duct tape, Gorilla Glue, and WD40 won't fix everything.

I use them to control the tremor that was congenital and now I believe is early Parkinson's disease. I will have to be checked out for this and now maybe I can. But, I live in a state that wants you to come back to doctor for each refill. In AR, you could have three refills at a time. My radiation/burst colon problem won't let me take other medications and I need more of this. Have to get a new doc because the family practice doc will prescribe dangerous meds for a teenager but will only allow me to have one prescription, no refills. Have not settled down enough to go to other doc. Believe me, I need it, but getting it is another thing. And, if I use more than the two prescribed a day, I cannot get a refill. So, I have to go to a doc that will prescribe it. I do understand where you are coming from, 100%.

Gwen, I cannot say I have learned anything from the meditation apps.. All I know is I listen to them for awhile and then I go to sleep. I wake up sometime during the night and remove the ear buds. I hope my sleeping mind absorbs something, but I could not even remember to do them again, so I doubt the use of subliminal messages. I know they have not warded off the panic attacks. I have cut myself down to one Xanax a day and use it at night. I need one during the day at times too, but I have held off and really needed it. If I take them often though, they do not seem to work as well. Listening to the apps though somehow keeps my mind from running away to places it does not need to go. I don't know how long I have been moved now. Those things just don't register sometimes.

Robin, I still have so much guilt about the morning Billy passed away. I missed my last chance to hold him, it was offered and I turned my back because I did not want him to give up. The good Lord knows I never meant to let him slip away like that. Where ever Billy is, I hope he can understand why I was angry. It is hard to live with sometimes, and everyone else can tell you to forgive yourself, and honestly, that is what has to be done. It is hard though, take it from someone who has not forgiven herself. I just have to numb-down at times. I know it takes time.

Kay, sometimes I wake up like a newborn babe with no sense whatsoever. Of course, when I was in Mount Ida I would go to sleep with the ear buds in my ears listening to meditation app's. I have them already, just have not thought of them till you mentioned it. You wonder what goes on in autistic children's minds, well, I think "grief brain" has to be just as maddening. Thanks, I will try them again.

What I can tell you, from seven years on, is that grief does get different. Not better. Better is a ridiculous word implying recovery, or things fixed that can never be repaired. But different - yes. Somehow, grief and love and life all find ways to co-exist together, none canceling the others out. (Megan on the blog of hers "Refuge in Grief.) I cannot look at the topic of her blog without reading "Refuge in Guilt." I hear life going on all around me. That is why I picked an apartment. I think about our different grief, our different paths, what we are all going through. I think about the age factor and (to me) it would seem horrible to be young and think life was over. But, it is also horrible to be older and think life is over. No, I do not want to live to be 95, like my mom, a bag of bones, already dead, but a brain that just won't let go. I cannot concentrate long on a novel. I have all those People magazines, that were just a waste of money. I thought I would have interest in articles, but I don't care to even look at them. At night I read autobiographies, biographies. Clark Gable now, with his marriage to Carol Lombard. How he spent the rest of his life, after her death, trying to find another one just like her. Supposedly, at the end, he had found it. They had a child. Clark had had a heart attack though and never saw the boy. I like to sleep, but invariably I will have to get up during the night. I used to think about RVing, about what Billy and I were going to do next, just things; then I would go back to sleep. Now I wake up wondering about Mama, how we are going to pay for her funeral, how I'm going to find a washer open at this apartment complex (impossible), but we cannot have them in the apartments. The double bills that are coming in August. My granddaughter's future. My daughter's temper. My son maybe going without groceries, all worries about other people in my family and I cannot sleep. An acquaintance has a friend who was attending her dying father in the hospital when her husband at home died of a heart attack. Both father and husband died within hours, minutes of each other. She could only be at one place. The death of the father was expected. The husband's death a total surprise. I know I need a therapist when the idea of even taking a shower seems futile. You know, you still have to think of other people. And caught the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken. And Lord, it took me back to something that I'd lost Somewhere, somehow along the way. (Johnny and Kris/Sunday Morning Coming Down (again)

I feel you Patty. I look up at the clouds and just say "I don't know." I think that fits everything in my life. "I just don't know." My heart is with you. And, I have got to say you both are beautiful together.

This Angel named "Precious" comes to the homes of hospice patients and bathes them. I retired from two hospitals. One of my coworkers obtained her nursing degree. She went directly to hospice, works the night shift. I know there have to be people for all professions, but these are true Angel's. My daughter volunteered at the hospital where I worked, she started at the age of 13. It was a teaching hospital and they let her have the run of it. She knew she wanted to be a nurse. She did go on to become a nurse and no one can handle my mom like she does. Billy was like this too, he certainly nursed me through two near deaths, and it took years. We were moving down here in the RV and he was going to help me with Mama. My dad would act like he was angry when we were ill. His worry came in the form of anger, yet his high school years were spent working in a funeral home. I am more like him about not having patience and I know my daughter inherited her own dad's abilities. I was fighting cancer myself when my dad passed away from cancer.. He battled it for four years. We only knew about Billy's five weeks. I know somewhere, somehow, I am supposed to feel blessed he did not suffer. I am.