Dating

As I sit at the computer, gazing out the window, I've got a view of the waning moon which is once again tracking the passing of a month. I've been looking for the constellation Orion but I haven't seen it yet this year (I probably haven't been looking at the correct time of night). I can see the neighbor's bushes adorned with a string of "Christmas style" lights - yet each bulb is illuminating a three-inch diameter, bright orange, plastic pumpkin.

Sorting through my thoughts seems to take more effort these days and my mind wanders more easily. As my sphere of experience expands, my thoughts and emotions seem increasingly complex (and rich). It was one thing for me to be working out issues on my own, to be thinking about my place in the world, to be experimenting socially. Processing thoughts and developing social skills could be done serially in the "baby step" style. It's been quite a different experience to be dating and to be spending time with someone one-on-one.

I really didn't know what to expect when I first starting dating. I certainly thought I was grounded enough that things would go smoothly. Quite the contrary, I initially acted much more like a bumbling schoolboy. Early on, I sensed a feeling of self-centeredness and of having expectations for how a relationship could/would develop (what could put more of a damper on things?) But there can be a vast gulf between feeling self-aware and being ready to change.

I guess I still felt defined by where I'd ended up: I was the guy who was a "widower", who was now dating. Probably in some ways I wasn't ready to be in a relationship - maybe my initial missteps were nature's way of protecting me and the women I was meeting. I actually felt that I had made progress when I wondered if "dating was worth the effort" and I started to think about what I was looking for. There was a palpable difference when I let go of my expectations and let things flow. I could just enjoy the date I was on with a person without worrying about "the next date" with that person. I also seemed to have let go of the self-imposed "widower" label and just began to think of myself as an "available" guy.

Whether there was a way to quantify "if I was ready" to date didn't matter so much as my intuition which told me that it felt OK.

Fall Colors

If you're not living up North then you are missing the colors. For a while it appeared they would be muted, but now the colors are ramping up...

Rebuilding at eight months

In the comedy film "What about Bob?" (with Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss) a psychiatrist writes a book called Baby Steps in which he urges patients to learn by breaking down their issues into smaller surmountable challenges. Instead of trying to solve everything in their lives all at once they're taught to take small incremental steps.

Even though in the beginning I felt like a wreck, I think baby steps helped keep me moving along (and they still do). The first week after Robin died I spent a lot of time in bed, or out front shoveling snow out of the street. The next few weeks I spent a lot of time on the beach in Florida reading books on grieving, e.g. "Tao of Loss and Grief". At the time I couldn't imagine the idea of writing on the blog again. I recall looking at the seagulls, wondering what their lifespan was, wondering what their purpose was, wondering why they persisted, wondering when these particular birds would meet their fate. There was life and death on display everywhere on the beach. I wrote daily in a journal. I hope to one day capture that on the blog.

Lately I've tried looking back in an attempt to categorize some of the phases I've been through. I guess they roughly break down into something like this:

-Need time alone. Painful memories insinuate themselves at will. no ability to concentrate. Sleep a lot. Watch TV a lot. Meds help me fall asleep at night, but the quality of sleep stinks.

-Start getting myself out of the house. Biking. Cutting the grass. Weeding the garden.

-Start doing yoga DVD in the morning/evening (20 minutes long). Start taking care of myself. I become well known at all the local take out restaurants. Somewhere in here I start blogging again.

-Look for opportunities to meet new friends. Socialize, some with old friends, some with new. Old friendships grow stronger. Start working out a little bit. Getting in shape - the best I've been in ten years. The combination of inconsistent eating and lots of biking drives my weight down - I've lost a total of 25lbs in one year.

-Starting to have fun again. Getting lost in activities. Getting back my smile, laugh, balance. Complete the challenging bike vacation over the summer. The lawn's not getting cut regularly anymore.

-Making time for myself. Making time to do chores. The grass gets cut a little more regularly, but not much. Making time to spend with friends.

-Start seeking out one-on-one experiences, dating. Blog communications blackout when it comes to dating information.

-Meet several folks. Eventually start wondering if dating is worth the effort. Blogging is slow.

-Meet someone new. Take things *very* slowly. Fourth date = first kiss. Aside from our slow pace, we agree that dating rules are a fictional construct and we agree to ignore them (e.g. don't call a woman for three days after a date). Dating for two months now. Still Blog blackout on the topic. Until a few days ago she didn't know about the blog herself. Eat out a lot, bike less with the cool weather - gain 10lbs.

-Friends still see me around and we still get together to do things. I feel balance in my life. Well, maybe friends see me around a *little* less!

Flying Lessons

I flew with a student today. He was practicing instrument flying which meant that he focused on flying by the instruments in the panel and he never looked outside of the aircraft. I (on the other hand) got to look out the airplane for the entire hour and a half. Funny how two people can be sitting so close and having entirely different experiences.

While his focus never got further than twenty-four inches, my focus was completely outside the airplane (my first priority was to watch where we were going.) I could see the foliage for about twenty miles around. Reds, oranges, shades of green. In one sea of brilliant oranges a bright yellow tree stood out by itself in a perfect circular shape - like a punctuation mark.

I was able to watch the sunset - seeing the reflections of the orange tinted clouds and blue sky in the local rivers and lakes. The air was so still on the surface that the bodies of water were like mirrors reflecting images back into the sky. After the sun set the clouds turned gray. The reflections changed from light blue and orange to deep blue and dark gray. It's no wonder so many people want to fly for a living…

The student continued to watch the instruments as night fell. Guided by the navigation equipment he flew us back to the airport, finally taking off his goggles when the plane was a half mile from the runway and four hundred feet above the ground. For him, the first sight out the windscreen after ninety minutes was the bright shining sea of lights at the airport - reds, greens, yellows and blue. A mesmerizing sight at the end of the trip, but nothing compared to the views he'd passed up along the way.

It's the Journey and not the Destination

I have to be reminded of this sage advice every once in a while (luckily I do get reminded!) My presumed "destination" has changed too many times in the last year-and-a-half so that there doesn’t seem to be much sense worrying about it. I guess we like to think of life as all packaged up for us - we can see where we started, where we are, and presumably where we are going to end up. It's not until there are drastic and unexpected changes along the way that we're "surprised" to find that the future isn't as forecast.

I guess this is another attachment for folks to get over in their grieving - that things didn't go as planned and that it's time to imagine new futures. I don't know who would be worse off - someone who wouldn't let go of the "old future" they had imagined, or someone who gave up on imaging any future. I could see giving up on the future as a serious option. For some folks it's either too scary to imagine the changes they need to make to achieve a new future, or it's too scary to think that they would imagine a new future and then lose it as well.

As I've been dating and meeting new people I've had occasion to come across folks who have had experience with either cancer or some other serious illness. More than once the thought has flashed through my mind "what if I got to know this person, developed a relationship - then they became ill, battled a disease, and I lost them?" I've come to expect this as a natural thought process for me to experience and not something to be scared of. As with other fears or doubts that occasionally run through my head I just acknowledge that they're OK to have but I don’t have to run my life by them.

Butterflies

Well, maybe it's a nature thing but in the last few weeks I've seen lots of Monarch Butterflies while walking and hiking - and they remind me of Robin too...

Dragonfly friends

Departing Cape Cod at night I can see a tiny sliver of a waxing moon on the horizon - it's a deep, deep orange as if getting ready for Halloween. As I travel it seems to move back and forth behind thin gray clouds. Off the plane's right wing I can see the lights of Provincetown at the tip of the Cape. Off the left wing are the lights of Nantucket and Marta's Vineyard. Flying home from the Cape, level at 6,000 feet I’m breaking out dinner while the autopilot directs the plane back to New York. I spent the weekend with Julia and Yani on Cape Cod - biking at sunset Saturday and attending Wellfleet's Oyster Festival on Sunday.

Late Sunday afternoon while Julia browsed through a shop, I had rested in a chair outside on the lawn. As I relaxed a dragonfly landed on my left knee and seemed to check me out. I thought about the dragonfly symbols on Robin's business cards and around her office. The dragonfly's on my knee bobbed its tail up and down, then its head. After a half minute the dragonfly took off, made a small circle and landed back on my knee. This went on for about five minutes, the dragonfly alternating between resting then taking off for a quick flight, then coming back to sit, move up and down, and clean itself. At one point I had an experience of feeling completely in the moment. For a short period of time I could see everything clearly. I could see every movement in the grass. I could sense the energy of the festival. I had a feeling of grieving well up from the inside, just enough to send a tear down my cheek. I wiped my eyes and cleared my head. Wow - it's been a while since that's come out.

Julia came out of the shop and asked what I was doing just as a second dragonfly joined the first one. I said I was hanging out with my dragonfly friends. They made a show of taking off and then landing back down on my leg - then they departed and left us to continue on our journey.

Bringing Up Issues

Last summer I had talked to Alex about dating. This was back when lots of different things would trigger a grieving response. I half-jokingly asked "so will dating bring up issues for me?"

He laughed and said "It will bring up *all* of your issues."

It's so helpful to know ahead of time where the rough patches are going to be. I'm really glad to have met him last Fall and to have had access to his guidance.

"Letting Go"?

This talk about "letting go" of a person after they've died doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I mean really, the person is literally gone so there's nothing physically to "let go of" is there?

I think when you've lost someone it's really your *attachments* which you need to let go of. I don't mean you have to forget the memories of the person, but if they were really close to you then it's the relationship (albeit now one-sided) that lingers. This may be a person with whom you shared views of the world or "philosophies" - maybe spiritual, religious, political, moral. If not bound by views about "how the world works" then maybe you were bound by shared experiences. The two of you could have recounted the many times you'd spent together in some relationship: siblings, friends, partners, or maybe even as parent-child. Maybe your views were diametrically opposed yet that's what you enjoyed about each other's company.

I think that's what people often have the hardest time letting go of. They have the hardest time acknowledging that the relationship (at least within this world) no longer exists. They cling to the memory of what it was like to be with the person, the conversations they could have *if* the person were here now, the moments they could share *if* the person were here now.

It seems like the healing really starts progressing when you start building new relationships with the people who are here. Maybe with folks you've known all along or maybe with new folks. The people with whom you can create new memories, the people with whom you can have conversations now, the people with whom you can share the present.

I wonder if sometimes people hold on to their "attachment to the relationship" because it gives them an illusion of control. A level of control which wasn't available to keep their loved one alive in the first place.

Billing

Why would I be writing about "billing" now? It seems that recently I resolved the last outstanding bills from New York City - a year after they were generated. Month after month many bills had arrived in the Winter, Spring and Summer. I would write the insurance information on the bills and send them back. Slowly, one-by-one they would fall off the radar screen. A most welcome sight were bills that would finally come back showing payment for everything except the $20 copay. I'd write a check and those bills would be gone for good

Two bills were notoriously persistent - one for $3,000 and the other for $500. Like all the other bills, each one came with a warning about referral to debt collection. Finally in a call to the insurance company we discussed and activated the "appeals process". Now, a couple of weeks later the claims have been approved, the claims will be paid. I should get a bill for the copayments soon. It will be about $100 and then it looks like no more bills arriving in the mail.

The emotional side

On July 5th I wrote about left brain-right brain and that in grieving it felt like the emotional side of the brain didn't really grasp that Robin was gone. I wrote that the emotional side had thought processes like a child: "You could explain everything logically [about death] to the child and they would seem to understand, then a few minutes later they could ask you if the person's going to be home for dinner."

Now that little voice chirps in every once in a while like it's playing twenty questions. These days the questions don't occur at the same time as grieving and now the little voice is asking "Where is she now? Where did she go to?"

Kaleidoscope

Lately it feels like I see life through a Kaleidoscope. Every morning, noon and night the view rotates and the colors change. Life is good.