Today, the thought occurred to me what will I title my posts after COVID-19 is dead? Then the opposite thought came to mind, what if COVID-19 is never gone? Will I still be using a day count to express the stay in place era? All of this is me trying to avoid the future. Why do we fear the future? Because we don’t know what it holds. I was trained to list my greatest fear and below that form two columns. In the first list all the things that can happen to me if the fear is realized. In the second column answer what is the worst thing that can happen to you if that fear comes to pass? The idea, is that if we analyze our fears they won’t be as scary as they were when we didn’t know what the outcome could be. In the case of COVID-19 the worst thing I fear is death. What is the worst thing that can happen if I die? What can be worse than dying of COVID-19, dying of old age. Dying is dying and it is something I have to accept whether I like it or not. At my age dying is imminent. I don’t spend my days thinking about dying, so why would I be afraid of dying from COVID-19? As my mother always told me, you have to die from something.
Yesterday, Mother’s Day frittered away in total waste. The only great activity I managed was a Zoom meeting with all of my kids and grandkids. Surprise, surprise all of them appeared before me except one who is in an essential job and had to work. Poor kid, he is a chef in a nursing home and well, we old folks love to eat.
This was the first time I used the Zoom service with my clan. It was nice to gather and all talk at once and try to make something out of the conversation, then everyone realizes that we are just making noise and then we all stop simultaneously, and then there is deathly silence. Eventually, one of us would reinitiate a conversation and the whole thing got cooking once again. In the beginning my second grand daughter was not there, she was sleeping since she works nights at her hospital. Later she joined us as she prepped for work. She is also an essential worker, a nurse. Her mother the same, but she had a day off, her father the same, but he is now working from his house. My oldest son is also considered essential since he is an engineer in a company that makes laboratory equipment to analyze stuff. He has to go into the factory everyday.
One of the funniest parts of the meeting was the show the dogs put on. Once a family sat on a couch they were joined by pets who felt they were being left out. Number three grandson gave us a cello concert and was accompanied by the bellow of his pet beagle. We all laughed. The beagle continued to howl until the concert ended.
We lasted this way for 90 minutes and then I decided it was time to call it quits, but not before getting agreement from all that this will be a good thing to do again on a regular basis. I will set up the meetings and send the notices with the links to join.
My son-in-law sent me a text with a picture of my daughter and grand daughter placing a rose on the grave of my first wife. Nice, I thought, even I don’t do that. Every time I go to the cemetery to visit the girls I ask myself just what do I accomplish by coming here? I visit, I trim the grass around her stone, I pray, and I speak to her as if we were sitting together at home. I have a habit of talking to her every day as if we were side by side. In fact, I do that daily with both wives. Sometimes, we talk individually, and sometimes we are a trio. Weird? I don’t need the cemetery to make that happen. I make it happen where the hell ever I happen to be when the conversation begins. The thing I hate the most about these talks is that I am the only one speaking. In life these ladies were quite loquacious. I had so many years of it that I have become accustomed to hearing a woman speaking to me and now that I am alone the silence often drives me nuts.
I have to end this now because it is time to talk with Barb and Peg.
Filed under: Aging, family, grief, Memories | Tagged: Cemetery, Mother's Day, Zoom |
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