Holidazed and Confused

 

My husband Chris died in February. My son and I are not Christian. He is agnostic / culturally Muslim and I am Sufi Muslim. Chris loved Christmas and its pomp and circumstance with all his heart, and made it a wonderful time for everybody who lived with, near or around him.  This time of year was so festive with him in the world.  He loved the Chieftains' old Christmas album "Bells of Dublin" and Vince Garaldi and other fun but non-irritating Christmas music. He had a huge Nativity scene including three Wise Men mounted on a camel, a horse, and an elephant, which he moved around the room so that they'd arrive at the manger on January 6, Epiphany. 

My son and I can't do any of this. The grief is too near and we are too non-Christian. I gave the Nativity scene to Chris' ex-wife, who had been his partner when he was collecting it when his kids were young. I gave all the other Christmas ornaments to her too, as she wanted them, and I didn't.  This year we have no tree. I did keep the artificial wreath and put it on the door.  

Chris with me in 2013 at a local bar

I had a holiday party at work to go to and it was really, really hard to be cheery.  I felt so drained afterwards. I know a lot of people feel like this at this time of year. I have never liked parties, but in the past I have actually had a good time at them. Chris used to say to me "you know once you go you'll have a good time."

It is a dark time of year with no Chris to provide cheer.  We are doing our best. I hope anyone reading this holds their loved ones close.  

Charities and Tygger

 I am one of those people who keeps track of charities even though I have not deducted them on taxes since the "Tax cuts and jobs act" of 2017 that raised the standard deduction so high.  I give to a lot of people-oriented charities, including some local ones, and a lot of environmental charities, again including some local ones. But my favorite charity by far for the enjoyment it gives me is my monthly donation to the Wildcat Sanctuary in Sandstone, Minnesota.  The cat above is Tygger, and I send a donation every month to sponsor him alone. I also send a regular monthly donation that is not earmarked.

The Wildcat Sanctuary sends me cute pictures of him. I have also bought a T-shirt of him. He is a lovely F1 Bengal - meaning that he is a hybrid of a domestic cat with a wild leopard cat.  These cats are bred for their looks, sold for thousands, and then usually euthanized because they are very feral and difficult to keep as pets.

Charities don't take the place of a well-run society with an active social safety net, but they give us joy. In fact, I think that's the main thing that makes people donate to them, not a selfless desire to do good, but the pleasure of giving.

I hope all of us are thankful for our many blessings and that we contribute as much as we can.

Another picture of Tygger, which just came in yesterday's email (The Wildcat Sanctuary called it his "glamour shot"):

Enjoy!

In Memory of Buzz the Cat, 2011-2024

This is Buzz. Buzz is gone.

Buzz was a tuxedo cat we adopted as a kitten for my stepson's 16th birthday. My stepson turned 29 this year.

Buzz was sleek, playful and had the prettiest tuxedo cat markings ever (a blaze on his nose, a white tail tip, white feet and a small white bib).

Buzz was also a problem sprayer all of his life.  I went through three couches and three easy chairs because of this. At the end of his life, we had aluminum foil and washable chair covers on all our furniture, and we had given up on having a couch. We tried everything. We tried Feliway, we tried various combinations and changes regarding litter boxes, we tried it all.  He would just spray when he wanted to. It didn't seem tied to stress. My final theory on this was that one of his testicles hadn't descended properly when he was neutered as a kitten, and that caused some sort of hormonal thing.

Buzz was the leader of our little clowder until he got ill towards the end of his life. He kept our youngest, fattest cat, Yuri, under control, and stood off from Krysta, our long-haired female cat who doesn't really like other cats, and was friends with our other tuxedo cat, Apollo.

Buzz played all the time. He was also very affectionate. He liked to get on laps and stretch out.  

He was an indoor-only cat, and when he was younger he would sometimes get out and stay outside until he had to go to the bathroom, at which point he would finally come in because he didn't know he could poop anywhere outside.

He was the best cat. My husband, who died about six months before he did, always commented that he was the oldest and yet most playful of our cats.  

You would think that my son and I would be relieved we don't have to worry about the spraying anymore, but we actually just feel sad.  I took all the foil down, and the rest of the cats are fine with having a lot more soft surfaces to sleep on, but we just miss our beautiful Buzz.

2024 has been a dark year

Chris, 1958-2024

Starting from now, I am making myself yet another promise to get back to blogging here, because I feel like I have things to say and not enough people to say them to. 

 I lost my husband in February. He had a lot of health issues, many of which were from his lifestyle, and one big one that was a rare genetic disorder. The lifestyle health issues contributed, but the big genetic disorder ultimately killed him.

He was my best friend, and we loved talking about stuff. All stuff. He was the person to bounce things off on, the person to come home to, the person to play board games with or spend hours on YouTube with or cuddle with. We met in 2009 and married in 2017.  It would have been exactly 15 years we were together had he lived another three months. 

He is gone and I am very bereft. 

I live with my grown son and three remaining cats - we also lost our oldest, amazing, beautiful cat later in the year. We are coping with a lot of grief for my husband, the cat and our values (now that we have also had a very traumatic national election that did not go the way we were hoping). 

 Hold your loved ones very close. If you have a choice between vegging out and doing an activity with them, do the activity. Many of them will be gone before you are, and those activities will create memories that sustain you in your grief. Love yourself but don't forget to check in with others you care about. If you are having a difficult time, maybe they are too. The best thing to do in grief, I've found, is to help each other. Just grieving together is much less soul-crushing than grieving alone. 

Commemorate those you've lost, through your own rituals and your own thoughts. Memory is a very weird, subjective, often objectively false thing but it is all we have from our pasts. 

 If you're reading this, bookmark and check back in. I will once again try to be more regular in screaming into the void.

Life got in the way

It's been more than a decade since my last post. I got married. I bought a house. My kids grew up. I have three grandchildren. Here we still are. I miss writing things that aren't emails for work. so, I've managed to log back in here. love and light.

The Story of Stuff

LibraryThing Review Link:
http://www.librarything.com/work/9037676/reviews/61133627

I picked this book up in a mall. I had not seen the YouTube video that the author had made prior to publishing the book, but I'd heard of it. I leafed through it and was caught up in reading about computer metals and how they are produced, used, and disposed of, when I realized I needed to leave. I bought the book.

I read this book on a plane. The book is about the material possessions that are so important to us Americans in our consumer society. It talks about extraction of resources, production and distribution of goods, marketing of goods, and the disposal of goods. The author had started out as an expert on disposal, particularly. She's originally a Greenpeace activist on garbage issues such as the barge that traveled the world looking for somewhere to put the garbage (I can hear Alice's Restaurant in my head right now). But at some point, she discovered systems thinking and started realizing that the garbage problem is really not easily separable from the other issues that lurk behind our happy consumer attitudes about "stuff".

The fact that I was reading it on the plane, where everything was disposable, made it that much more poignant to me.

I was raised by a very liberal family and my father is an environmental activist who lives in a cabin "off the grid" using hydro and solar power and a self-composting outhouse. I also lived in developing countries much of my adult life and I observed many of the issues about garbage and disposable goods that Ms. Leonard talks about in her book. In other words, I am the choir to whom this book is preaching. It gave me some good ideas about how to reuse things, avoid other things (such as vinyl - I had no idea it was such bad news), and in general try to be a better individual American consumer.

But really, what would be great is if this book became the start of a movement for Americans to get back to being people and not consumers. We are human beings foremost. It is true we need material goods to live. But we should not be living in order to get material goods. The best chapters of this book, for me, were not the ones on the life cycle of "stuff" but on how we can make our lives less consumerist.

I highly recommend this book to all readers, particularly the younger ones. The future can definitely be different and this book is a very good place to start realizing this.

Hoffmania!

I just got done reading a great book by the fabulous teller of tales, E.T.A. Hoffman: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. Below is my review, which I also posted to Library Thing:

When I was in college, majoring in Spanish literature, I had to read several works and poems that used a style I’d call “fierce satire.” They were, not to put too fine a point on it, mean. There were two Spanish poets who would write insulting sonnets back and forth to each other – Hilarious, but very dense in references, and so unkind that after reading them I had a bad taste in my mouth.

This book is a happy, gentle satire. It was really a flash of brilliance on Hoffman’s part to use a tomcat to parody a self-satisfied person of his time, who follows trends in society and believes he is a setter of them. All cat lovers will tell you that he picked the perfect animal to represent self-satisfaction.

The Kreisler story, or rather the discarded draft of the Kreisler story upon which Murr has written his autobiography, shows a very different character, one who actually has artistic genius and true depths of feeling, but who is paradoxically much less in control of his life than Murr, while being much more self-aware. The funny fake court in which the story takes place is the closest Hoffman comes to being fierce as he mocks all that must have been wrong with German aristocracy at the time.

The book is intensely psychological and in this sense it seems way ahead of its time. Even with its humorous and satirical narration, I had a sense of understanding and empathy for “bad” characters such as Mme. Benzon that I would not have gotten from other books of the period. Mostly, the backstories for these characters are hinted, and not fleshed out, which makes the book really fun. I have found that the more I read the less I want the narrator filling in blanks for me.

This is not to say that I liked the ambivalent ending. I want a sequel. Collette wrote a short story about a cat in which the cat supposedly was about to die, and she resurrected her at the very end, so that could be done again. Hint hint. Where is a modern Hoffman to carry on this tremendously funny fairy tale? A weary nation of book and cat lovers waits for you.