Former Mistreatment is Outdated.

"Give it a fucking rest. You don't have to remind everyone of the date and time of Greg's death. You fucking Facebooked it and less than 6 months later, you're fucking someone else. Saying pretty words doesn't change that shit."

 

This comment was left for me by an anonymous source. Of course it was. I wouldn't want to be accountable for this statement either. But I do think it has some merit and wanted to address it. I'm pretty sure whoever wrote this (and I have my suspicions) is not the only one who has assumed the worst of my behaviour in this regard.

When Greg died, I had the impression that a lot of people expected my grief to somehow equal the amount of love we shared, as if that's even possible. People judge how people should behave all the time, but it is an interesting thing when someone dies. There is weird protocol that is laid out but never divulged. Everyone wants you to feel & act a certain way. People gauge your mourning period like it somehow validates how you cared for the deceased. Some don't want you to be happy until they feel you should be, because otherwise you must not have valued your loved one enough.

Enough. It is impossible to be enough for some people.

 

Some expected me not to get out of bed for months. Some expected me not to laugh for weeks. Some thought I would obviously be alone for the rest of my life, eventually dying of heartbreak.

This could have happened. I could have allowed myself to do exactly what I felt like doing and let my life and my soul just waste away. But I have said it before and I mean it: Greg would never have allowed himself to be with me if he didn't know that I was strong enough to make it without him. In fact, we discussed whether or not he would want me to date/marry/fall in love if he passed away. He was astonished I would have even asked such a question. 

 

"I would want you to be happy."

And that is what I have been striving for. Not just for me- for us. For the Sheena and Greg that still exists and is still very real to me. The Greg and Sheena that still have beer at the Druid and laugh and make jokes at our own expense. The Sheena and Greg that embrace even the abhorrent and turn it into appreciation. We were greater than the sum of our parts. And this will be a fiber of my being until I die.

I will be Sheena and Greg for the rest of my life.

But beside that, I am still me. I am still the girl that makes off coloured jokes and says shit you should never say at funerals and dinner parties. I am still the one who cries at pictures of baby meerkats. I am still the girl that burns grilled cheese sandwiches. I am still the girl who can't fall asleep without noise. I am still the girl that tweets like it's going out of style and makes friends and thinks people are the most amazing things ever.

I'm still the girl that loves. Often. Liberally. With abandon.

And I will continue to. I will continue to love men. And women. And affection. And sex. And this may upset people that can not understand how I can exhibit such behaviour after six short months. People may not understand how I can be happy with another after the relationship that I had with Greg. They have even expressed that they don't understand how I can adore one and mourn the other.

Let me assure you, I can. And do.

People do not have to appreciate or respect my fumbling attempt at normalcy. But people are also in the fortunate position to not have to feel the void and longing that sits like a vacuum inside of me every fucking minute I am not asleep or ensconced in the love and support of my friends and family. I am still aching. I am tired of my own voice. I am still in healing and may never not be. But certain things lighten the load of this weight. And the love and affection and beauty of people are invaluable to me.

So, while I do not feel the need to justify my behaviour, let alone to someone unwilling to even sign their name to such a vile and insipid comment, I do understand that death is a muddled emotional area and insight is valuable. People want to know that Greg's name and memory has not been disavowed. They want to know that he is still as big to me in death as he was in life. People want me to honour him the way he so deserved.

And I just wanted to assure you all that if he were able, he would ease your minds. He would tell you he is just as loved and brilliant in my life as he was the first day I ever met him.

And then he'd tell you to see the new Star Trek trailer. It's awesome.

My Friend Got Me Marijuana.

No.

No, I am not insinuating that marijuana in and of itself is a big fucking deal, in spite of what every asshole with a pot leaf flag and "CHRONIC" tee shirt would have you believe. Pot is pretty close to smoking potpourri if you take away the fact that we have spent billions of dollars on bullshit research trying to prove that it may or may not be the reason our kids are failing math.

The reason I am writing about this is because it's a big deal for ME. I have never been much of a pot smoker and when I did, I did it poorly. It's like watching a baby use chopsticks- it's clumsy, they're probably going to hurt themselves, and all you want to do is help them. Throw in an analogy about starving to death and it becomes clear the kind of infant I am with a joint in my hand.

I don't even know how to roll a joint.

I either smoke too little and feel nothing, or I smoke too much and can't speak. I become self-conscious and panicky. I stop conversing for fear that words will be misplaced or out-dated and people get nervous which makes me nervous and ohmyGod how has only three minutes passed since the last time I checked the clock I am going to be high forever can someone take me home now?

No exaggeration. Me on marijuana has traditionally been a fucking nightmare.

But I decided a while back that I wanted some for a few reasons:

1. Because my sleep was horrific and it was more natural and less addictive than prescription sleeping meds.
2. I may benefit from it's stress-relieving properties.
3. This will be fucking hilarious.

So, I am kicking around the idea of getting high one night, alone, and blogging the experience for posterity. One of the last times I got severely high, I watched Seinfeld and was astonished at how many inaccuracies and mistakes were in it and wrote them all down to send in to the producers. It was years after Seinfeld was already in syndication not to mention the fact that upon reading the seven pieces of scrawled upon looseleaf the next morning, not one word was legible. I am hilarious when I am high and I feel it would be a tragic disservice not to record it for you all to enjoy.

I'm not always such a bummer. Sometimes I encourage you to laugh at me.

I will be giving more updates on when this will be occurring on Twitter and Facebook, so feel free to check in. Or not, because let's face it, this is a pretty stupid idea.

See? I'm fitting in with the stoner community already.

Memory is a Terrible Thing When You Use it Right.

I haven't blogged in a while. Dictating and recording a life is a little difficult when you are attempting to survive it. But I do feel remiss. Things have happened. This post won't be pretty, but I will do my best to make it beautiful.

By now, everyone is aware that the love of my life died June 30th, 2012 at 1:36pm.
Yes. I recall that date, that time, every few hours, every day. And not just because I have his time of death as an reminder on my phone. This tragedy shut me down a little. It changed me. It altered how I see the world. This is assumed. This is obvious. This is not surprising. This is not what this post is about.

This post is about the miscarriage I suffered throughout the month of December and how I manage to convince myself that there is some reason to still get out of bed in the morning.

It wasn't a huge surprise. Nothing in my life ever really seems to be. All I knew to do was exhale. What better woman to be growing life inside her than the broken doll that felt life drain from her hands mere weeks before. In keeping with tradition, this development was not a secret to the people in my life. We made jokes. I was self-deprecating. There were deep conversations. There was more laughter. I cried. It was all we knew how to do.

But at the end of November, I started bleeding. Again, not surprising. I was having trouble keeping myself sustained, I was shocked my body had even gotten as far as it had in growing new life. It was barely keeping the old one afloat.
I went to the hospital. No heartbeat. I nodded. They gave me the list of warning signs and told me that there wasn't anything to do that nature wouldn't take care of on it's own. Come back if you have a fever. Watch your bleeding. Sorry for your loss. I didn't even get a pamphlet. The bleeding continued. Not a lot, but enough. My breasts stopped feeling sore. They never grew in size. I stopped gaining weight. I had no additional symptoms. My body just... quit.

I knew the feeling.

Weeks passed. The bleeding and the fatigue and the emptiness continued but never really got any better, nor any worse.Until one night when there was a additional gush of blood. Most normal people at this point would have been concerned. Concerned about their own health and safety. Concerned about the possibility of a mistake. Most people would have asked someone for help.
I, of course, did not.

Because tragedy was not a surprise.

So I called and ran over the list of symptoms and the nurse explained that "every woman is different." That was an under-statement in my case. I let it go. I stopped eating. I stopped drinking. My sleeping was a mess. I constantly cried and laughed and felt generally horrible. I had financial setbacks. The holidays were killing me. I wanted to quit my life. Noting out of the ordinary or surprising and yet everything felt too new to predict or control. So I decided not to fight it. And I continued to bleed. Every day.

"How are you feeling?"
"You look tired."
"How are you holding up?"
"Can I get you anything?"
"What do you need?"
"It will get better."
"You are so strong."
"We love you, Bee."

Between the holidays, my disintegrating new dating life, general pity, and my health, I couldn't decipher when one symptom bled into another only to become actual blood and what, if anything, I could do about any of it. Every fiber of my being was a sullen extension of a dying woman that finished sentences and told jokes.

After an excruciatingly long and hard month, I was ready for a reprieve. I had Christmas plans, I finally purchased gifts a week before Christmas day... it was almost over. 2012 was almost fucking over. I just needed to hold out a couple of more weeks.
A friend from Prana Holistic here in Edmonton came by one night to give me reflexology. She was aghast at my physical reaction to her treatment and explained that something was definitely not okay. I agreed. Nothing was okay.

That night I started to get a fever. I made the joke that her witchcraft was killing me and she was fired. The fever hit 103 degrees. Thinking it was sepsis from the miscarriage, I took the necessary precautions. If every woman was different, I was unrecognizable. I was sure this was par for the course. After all, wasn't everything? Nothing surprised me. So I slept and waited. Waited to get better. Waited for health. Waited for the holidays to come and go. Waited for my energy and my life to feel like mine again. I laid there thinking something wasn't right. I looked around and realized that nothing was right. So, I tried to sleep.

"How did you not know you were miscarrying this whole time?"
"Didn't you feel something was wrong?"
"How did you not go seek help?"
"We love you, Bee." 

Christmas eve, as I was waiting for my friend to show with eggnog so we could ring in Santa's birthday in style, I began to feel cramping. Not hugely painful, but not quite ignorable either. I said aloud, "Well, that's a feeling I haven't felt before..."
But nothing surprised me anymore. I went to the washroom.

I froze.

All I could see were tiny fingers amongst the bowl of my own blood, waving like a greeting and a good bye.

I immediately felt the life of us both drain from the room. 

"How are you feeling?"
"You look tired."
"How are you holding up?"
"Can I get you anything?"
"What do you need?"
"It will get better."
"You are so strong."
"We love you, Bee."

I could go into detail about retrieving it, mourning it, burying it. And I have considered it. Considered going into all the detail I so desperately longed for when I spent nights on websites and message boards digging for answers. And maybe one day I will. For the woman in small town Saskatchewan or Ontario or Minnesota three years from now who wants to know how different a woman she has to be before something is deemed wrong enough to worry about.

It was hard to move like a hollow shell through the next few days. I only told the necessary people I needed to and let the rest enjoy their Christmases as much as they could. People asked me how I was doing as the first Christmas without Greg would be the hardest one. I agreed and smiled. I told them I was okay and I wondered if I was lying.

"Can I be done now?", I weeped.

I thought it was over. Except it wasn't.

I proceeded to have what can only be described as labour alone in my bathroom as my body writhed in pain in an expedited attempt to eject what was left of the life previously distilled. The pain and blood were indescribable. At one point, limp and ruined in a dark bathroom, I gave in to the reality that I may die. I even said good bye. Aloud. To no one. After four hours, I opened my eyes and could actually see again. The bathroom may have resembled a murder scene, but I was still alive. I would like to say I was relieved but something happens when you give up on your own life. Especially after you have witnessed a smaller life give up on you.

The last few weeks I have experienced the typical physical, emotional, and hormonal adjustment period. Nothing surprising. I have had support. I have had love. I have had moments of laughter and joy. As with the tragedy of Greg's death, I feel I owe my sanity and my soul's armor to those around me who refused to let me whither and die. No matter how many times I decided to give up.

Because that is what I have realized. Life doesn't have boundaries. It can't be contained in a dying body, or a forming child, or a listless woman in a pile of tears on the floor. It resonates and undulates in everything and everyone. The life force from my friend's fingers into my feet; the life force in the soup or slurpee brought to my door at midnight; the life injected through the hugs, the tears, the kisses, the gestures made by even people I have never met. Life has changed forms a lot in the past six months, but it hasn't left me. It hasn't quit.

And neither have I.

"We love you, Bee."

So for now, I will let the woman who still looks at the pictures of her dead child every day look inside for a while at the life she has left. I will let her feel the love and the life that has kept her afloat while surrounded by death and the disintegration of the world she knew.
Maybe she can heal first before she attempts to heal the world. Or recreate it.




Maybe she can start to surprise herself.

What Not to Listen to When You Are Low.

FollowFriday Says What.

http://www.followfriday.com/followfriday/arbitral

I rank 435 in Canada and 48 375 in English ranking.
They tweeted to alert me of this.

If anyone has any idea what the shit this actually means, I would be grateful.
I'd like to know if I have won free tickets to Honeymoon Suite or something.

Words with Sadness.

I remember being about 23 years old and writing pages and pages of nonsense. I would start by writing words and incoherent sentences. Sometimes without spaces between the words, because they didn't make sense anyway and it added an interesting element to my experience. I would get about 2 or 3 pages in before a theme would begin to form. Words became sentences and sentences became thoughts and thoughts would become ideas and all of a sudden I would have 7 or 8 pages of back to back scribbling and the world would make sense again.

I wrote a lot back then. I don't write as much now, because it's not 1997 and my typing skills have far surpassed my handwriting. I don't know if typing would have the same affect. I don't know if there was something more personal about holding a pen and feeling the paper press beneath the weight of the words. Like hanging up a cell phone after an angry call, it will never replace the satisfaction of slamming a receiver down and storming away in a huff.
But maybe I could give it a try. See if the damage might come out to play in an environment where music isn't blasting, beer isn't flowing, and people aren't coaxing the laughter out instead. I don't wish to ignore my grief. I don't want to make my despondence feel unwelcome. I just don't know how to talk to them very well anymore. I haven't been this kind of sad in a very very long time. Like learning another language, if you don't use it, you lose it. I have lost my ability to talk with my sadness. To suss her out and make her okay again.

Perhaps the tools I used then will work now.
Perhaps not.

But I figure I have to try something.

You can only drink Gin & sing for so long.

Paper Faces.

This guy chose my Twitter avi to use for one of his Paper Faces, using the Paper app on ipad.

http://mademistakes.com/articles/paperfaces-portrait-gallery.html

I have this app.
I can not do this.

To Be Grateful.

This year will go down in my history as the hardest of my entire life. Learning what it means to have a part of yourself die with the last breath of the most important person to create the world as you now know it is a lesson I will never master.

While I carry an ache now all too familiar and constant, I am filled with gratitude that is immeasurable. The support and love I have felt has been stunning & overwhelming. Recalling the battalion of lovable misfit brats that Greg & I have amassed over these last four years reaffirms that our love was bigger than we ever were.

"I don't know how I am going to do this..."

"With an army behind you."

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for you.
For your texts. For your messages. For your calls. For your time spent. For your tears. For your music. For your arms. For your poetry. For your laughter. For your talents. For your sincerity. For your care. For your words. For your generosity. For your brilliance.

For loving us.

I would not be who I am today without you all.



I love you.

Interview With Sheena: Chapter 1.

"So, what gets you up in the morning?"

"Worry. That is the simplest and most clear answer I can give you. Worry about whether it will be another wasted day. Worry about the things I am ignoring that will be of detriment to the future me that, unless I quit life, will be forced to deal with my fears. Worry that I will slip into the depression everyone expects of me. Worry for my family. Worry that I am creating, out of a good intention that I told Greg on his deathbed, a lie: that I would be okay."

"What are you excited for?"

"Not much. Initial excitement soon gives way to terror as the rest of my life unfolds like a map that has been rammed haphazardly into the glove compartment. And as anyone who knows me can attest, I am not good with direction at the best of times."

"Any events coming up?"

"Music shows. Amanda Palmer at the 29th of this month in Vancouver. Matt Anderson. Dan Mangan. Gaslight Anthem with Hotwater Music. A best friend's wedding. Football games with my dad and pub nights with friends..."

"So...?"

"Oh, my dad just set me up with a therapist. That is something to be both terrified and excited about. Like any relationship."

"None of this sounds like you are planning your next move in life."

"That is not an accident."

"You're not?"

"No."

"Not to judge, but what is stopping you? What is the hardest part?"

"Fear makes my decisions for me right now. Not making a decision is making a decision. So, not checking the mail/ phone calls/ voicemail makes a lot of decisions for me. Not checking the bank account keeps the laughter around a bit longer. Hiding creates a cocoon. My next life is a horrifying endeavor. Imagine the strength most people need to clean out a storage closet. I need to clean out my life."

"What do you miss most about Greg?"

"I can't answer that. Their is no hierarchy of love, nor pain. Heightened emotion creates action, and action builds the elements of your life. My entire life is absent from a huge life force that helped to design the blueprints of a building now crumbled to the ground, with all of the architectural plans disintegrating with it."

"That sounds brutal."

"It ain't easy."

"How are you feeling? Does anyone ask that? Is that a stupid question?"

"It's not a stupid question, though it is an idealistic one. It assumes I have an answer or, even less likely, will be able to articulate it. I am numb. Or distracted. Or hidden. Or destroyed. I am only sad alone, though. Very very few people see me at my worst. It is not a natural role for me."

"What is your natural role?"

"Life of the party. Fun beam. Cockeyed optimist. Love addict. Inspirational speaker and motivational role model. Okay, those last things are kind of a joke, but only kind of. My brother used to refer to me as a muse. He said my talent was making others better people."

"And you are not this now?
"I am not comfortable being a source of inspiration for people, as I am not confident I am a role model for anyone. Being "strong" or "inspiring" to people now seems to mean that I am not suicidal or a drug addict or a cutter. The intention is the same, but the filter through which I communicate has changed. There is a prism of sadness, and grief, and regret, and pity that changes my intent. It is not my current strength, let's leave it at that."

"So you don't make people feel better anymore?"

"Usually it is by being the emotional barometer of the room. At the funeral, the wake, pub nights... if I am able to look like I am okay, maybe everyone can believe it WILL be okay, and thus, they can be okay, too."

"Do people still come to you with their problems?"

"Often. Sometimes too much. Sometimes selfishly, saying things like 'We are totally sharing in our grief...' when I assure you we are not."

"You are not sharing the grief?"

"No. Not being able to see a guy that you saw at punk rock shows 6 times a year by accident is not something that can be shared with a woman who had her entire life pulled out from under her and has spent the last few months hiding under it."

"It does seems a bit insensitive."

"You have no idea."

"Examples?"

"No names, but I have had a girl say that her pain was paramount because I was prepared, where as she was SHOCKED. I had another compare the death of her 15 year old boyfriend to Greg's death because she also considered him the love of her life. As though a 15 year old and a 35 year old would have the first fucking thing in common when it comes to love, let alone the destruction of a life build on plans and dreams and hope. Hope means something different at 15 than 35. Trust me. I was 15."

"Ouch."

"The cake was probably a girl telling me that they know how I must feel because they, too, understand my despondence due to working in a warehouse/trade with men who don't believe in the plight of the female tradeswomen."

"They compared the death of your fiance to their male dominated job environment?"

"It's ongoing, dude. Some days I have to defend my absurd tweets with the hashtag #widowtweets because people believe they have a more depressing story. Like the traffic ticket they got that day."

"I don't have words. I just... that is nuts."

"They say the stages of death include anger. I am in no way angry at Greg, or 'God', or the care of the medical team at the UofA, or Life, or any of that shit. What I am angry at is the insensitive and narcissistic characters I am coerced into dealing with about this tragedy."

"Have you gone off on them?"

"Not yet."

"Yet?"

"Yet."

"I would be excited to witness that."

"A few close friends who have been present for many of these situations have shared in your enthusiasm. They feel I am long overdue."

"Can we continue this later? I have a feeling you are getting sleepy."

"I am. But I would like that."

"Thanks, Sheena."

"Thank you."

"I look at myself, I did not see me anymore..."

"At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;
Then it landed on earth to look at me.
Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey;
That moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.
I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore;
For in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul.
The nine spheres disappeared in that moon;
The ship of my existence drowned in that sea..."

"Better by far you forget and smile

Than you should remember and be sad.."

Thank you, friends. Friends who somehow know I am up at 2:30am in need of sweet words.

https://twitter.com/Mike_FTW

"You're my new favourite..."

I do not pity my situation. In fact, I do not pity anyone's situation. More often than not, I am that annoying bastard that sees the opportunities and the silver linings and the possibilities that unfold in front of us all when adversity strikes.

I mean, sure, I probably drink too much, but I am overall a pretty emotionally stable and mentally solid individual.

But I am struggling. And not in the way most people have probably expected.

I have spent the last 4 years taking care of someone else. It was not one sided, as anyone who spent more than 2 minutes around us would have immediately realized, but I think one of the reasons that Greg & I worked so well together is that we found a beautiful agreement: you take care of me and I will take care of you. At the end of the day, everything and everyone was taken care of and we would fall asleep content with the life we had and excited for the life that was consistently evolving for us.

I didn't realize that this was a bit of a cop out for us. It kept us from having to make ourselves the priority in our own lives.

Now that I am left on my own, I realize that taking care of myself and my future is not the reason I do anything.
Anything.

I get up because if I don't then my family will think I am sinking. I go out because if I don't then my friends will worry about me. I laugh hard and often because I am afraid that one day I might forget how. I have bills in stacks. I have calls to make. I have voice mails left unheard. I have mail left unchecked. I have dishes left to do.

And some days, I get a bit of a lift and I do these things. I do them before anyone really has a chance to realize anything was wrong.

Someone asked my friend how I was doing.
"She's good..." she replied.

I was livid. This is not just a lie, but it is also so destructive to what I am trying to remind myself... that I am NOT okay. That this is NOT normal. That this life is NOT going to sustain itself for much longer.

I have had a couple of amazing people surface and resurface into my wee tangled life as of late that remind me that there is not only pain elsewhere in the world, but also brilliance and love and excitement and hope. Small gestures like a hand held or a compliment or a 6 hour phone conversation like I am sixteen again... there are joys. There are genuine moments of feeling beautiful and adored and loved and desired and included and necessary in someone else's life again.

Is this selfish? Maybe. But it might be necessary.
To remind me that I am not half of something.

Just a whole something that hasn't realized it yet.

"Life is Slippery. Here, Take My Hand."

If I put this entry off any longer, I will never write it.

I still don't really know what story I want to tell here. The one about the love I had with Greg, the one that tells the tale of his last days, or the one that describes how it is getting harder to get out of bed every day rather than easier. I feel I may run out of words. Or will.

So this will be part one. The days leading up to his death. The technicalities. Some of the answers to the questions such as 'how did it happen?' and 'how did he go so quickly, he was doing so well?' The moment of his death is a chapter all its own, and I will do my best to summon the emotional strength to delve into that pool one more time for you.

On Monday the 11th he was having a lot of trouble breathing. After seeing his doctors, they upped his anti-rejection meds and steroids and the line between his sickness and his side effects started to blur. It was a hard week. He barely slept. He had to sit down from breathlessness from just going to the washroom. He didn't eat. He was miserable and uncomfortable all the time.
"I have a follow up appointment on Tuesday, Mee. Let's just give it the weekend for the meds to do their thing..."
So we did.

The last photo he ever took with the caption "Good morning sunshine #nofilter #rejection?"
http://ink361.com/#/users/1125425/photos

On Saturday evening while he was sitting at our kitchen table, I caught an expression on his face. One I had never seen before.
"Baby, are you scared?" I asked him.
He started to tear up and he nodded.
"I just don't want to leave you."
Leave me. Not die. He was never afraid to die. But this was the first time I had ever seen him afraid that he might not make it. And it terrified me.

On Monday I came home from work at 10am. He was having what I can only describe as an escalating panic attack from not being able to catch his breath. I called the ambulance. Once they came I packed his overnight bag, as I always did when he had to stay at the hospital, and went to meet him in Emergency. On the 15 minute drive to the hospital I saw three dead animals on the road. I started to cry.

When we got in to see him, there was something not quite right. He was agitated. He wasn't faintly smiling like he always did. He looked worried. These are things Greg almost never expressed when he was in the hospital. It was always much more important for him to feign casual comfort for the emotional stability of his family. He would always fake a smile, crack a joke, anything just to see me smile, too. And he could barely look at me.
"It's just because he hasn't gotten any sleep and he has been miserable this entire week," James said. I nodded.
But that wasn't it.

By the next morning the doctor decided it would be best to sedate him while the body healed. This is also known as putting someone in a medically induced coma. It was for the best, they said. It will just be for a couple of days, they said.

This was the last text I ever received from him.

That was the last time I saw him awake. The last time I told him I loved him and knew he could hear me. The last time I felt him squeeze my hand back.

In lieu of telling the same minutia of medical and emotional drama that followed the next 2 weeks, I will share with you excerpts of the Evernote I was sharing with Greg titled "The Hospital Diaries." My plan was to document life as he slept so when he awoke he would have stories and something to fill in a few of the blanks he may have. Excuse the typos. I have left it unedited for posterity.

Note: The Evernote audio files are usually just me singing our silly songs to him and telling him I love him through muffled tears and outright sobs until I compose myself and apologize and tell him I will try to do this again tomorrow. It always ended up the same way.

Note: I still have the plastic piece. I sits on a statue of Thor with a lock of his hair. It took me a week to move it from the floor after he died.

And that was as far as I got before it started to become much too scary for me for carry on. I couldn't conceive of documenting anything as just getting through the day was a feat. There were complications, "set backs", improvements, and the unexpected. It was a fucking ridiculous roller coaster and every day became a bit more grim than the last.
Until the Friday when they said that his prognosis had stabilized and his oxygen was excellent. They took the dialysis machine off of him, they had quit his plasmapheresis and it looked like they could start taking him off sedation by Saturday. The family was so excited we went to the Tymofichuk's for a celebratory barbecue. We raised our glasses for Greg and my heart felt lighter than it had in weeks.

And then James got off the phone with the hospital.

"Greg had a stroke."

By the time we got there, the doctors explained that the stroke may have been bleeding for days. The damage was "extensive." They couldn't guarantee that he would have the brain function to keep himself alive on his own.

I recall standing beside Greg's bed, reading Tina Fey's Bossypants to him and laughing, when the devastating reality was explained to us. Behind me, I heard Marie collapse in wails. I heard Randy, the rock of the family, reduced to tears. I heard James start repeating "no... no..." until they, too, became ruined sobs. I rested my head beside Greg and stroked his hair, softly telling him that I loved him and that I would be okay and that he could go. I didn't even believe that I would be okay, but I knew that the only thing that would keep Greg clinging to this life was his desperation to stay with me and take care of me. I was so intent on making sure he knew he could move on that I don't even think I remembered to cry myself.

"You have to make a decision..." the doctor said. We knew what she was talking about.

As soon as it became clear that the Greg we knew had already slipped through our fingers, we left for a sleepness night only to return in the morning with a unanimous decision.

"I would love that man if the only part of him that remained alive was his left foot but I would never do that to him."
The family agreed.

We were all together the next morning; Randy, Marie, James, Anne, and his best friend Nathan. The shock and sadness was trumped only by the overwhelming love and support everyone had in that room for each other. And for Greg.

"Leave it to Greg to wait until we could all be together before he passed..." I said.
"He was always so fucking considerate."

It was good to hear everyone laugh.
It would be awhile before we would do it again.



cont...

Thanks, Klout. That's Really... Something.

CF Pirate Party Fundraiser.

This year, the batshit crazy party is being held at the Artery. The max capacity is a little less so, for God's sake, get there early. There are also going to be some surprise guests that are not included on the poster for political reasons, so ask around. This is going to be the kickoff party of the summer like WHOA.

May really is the greatest month for us.

Happy Eighth!

My Boyfriend Does Art Stuffs.

And it is good. Like, really good. I am overwhelmingly jealous and proud.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the art show to support everyone this weekend.
It means the whole wide world.

Me. Every afternoon.

This is what I do when I hear Greg come through the door after work.

"We're Rockin' this bitch..."

It's been a while since I have posted anything. Consider it a good sign that I have been busy doing a savage amount of fun shit. WHO GOES OUT THIS MUCH IN MARCH?

Notably, after 20 years of adoration, I finally got a chance to see one of my  faves, Sir Ben Folds.



And he improved.
Someone shouted out "Rock this bitch!"
And he did. THEY did.
The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra was astounding.
The entire show was one of the best I have ever seen. I am so glad that, even though not a huge fan of Folds, Greg was able to come and share that with me. It was also excellent to know that just a few rows closer to the stage sat Shawn with his brother. Everyone that should have been with me was. Including a sweet guy from Calgary that sat beside me having the absolute time of his life.

That being said, the ever lovely Lindsey Walker and I have a date to see Kathleen Edwards on Monday and I am simultaneously excited and relieved. Greg had me convinced that he left it too long and the tickets were sold out. I almost keyed his car.
I have never missed a show since the release of Failer and I am certainly not starting now. Greg waited just long enough before I started selling off his comics to pay some dude named Ned on Kijiji. Perhaps some decadent Steak Tartar at Accent before the show?

Man, my life can be beautiful.

You can always tell the birth of spring in Edmonton between the sifts of snow by the way people begin to talk to each other... in excited, anticipatory tones. So many music shows. Comedy. Art shows all over our lives. We can barely keep our calenders straight.
"Which art show is this? Who is hosting this?"
 As Greg has said, when it comes to much needed R & R, Monday/Tuesday is our weekend. Starting Wednesday evening, we don't stop. And it never seems to get old. We do surround ourselves with some amazing people.

It is hard not to be grateful.




Aside: The annual Pirate Party/CF fundraiser/ Greg birthday bash is being held at the Artery this year, May 20th, and some pretty excellent people have agreed to be a part of it.

Of course they have.

Love you too, Marko.