I ran into a statue shaped a little like Heather today. I love how muscley she is around the arms. I have decided that I might go talk to this statue when I need advice from Heather. Although really, since Heather was so opinionated it's not like I ever had to wonder, or have to wonder now, what she would say about something.

I am at Maura's house tonight, and went to bed at 9 PM because I was exhausted from spending the night at my sister's house (it was really fun, but I didn't sleep much the previous night) and so I woke up at 2 am. I seldom have any problems sleeping, but I have to leave to catch a bus back to New York at 5 am anyway, so I just got up.

When I sleep in Maura's guest room/office I can't help but think of the nights I spent there with Heather, good moments mostly, because we were traveling (to France, and then to NOLOSE) and because Maura's apartment has great heat, and she was warm enough and I was warm enough. We slept with our shirts off at least one night, which was very rare for us and if I close my eyes I can almost remember the way our skin felt together. It's been more than nine months. Still it seems unfathomable to me that someone with whom I was skin to skin can be gone forever. It should seem like the contact should have somehow kept her here, like somehow her heart beating against my back, her arms wrapped around my middle, would be something even cancer couldn't rip apart.

I was paging through Borrowed Time by Paul Monette yesterday. More than any of his other books, it details the loss of his partner (and for chrissake practically every other person in his life) but it has a tone of desperate hope, of how life, as he describes it--between the bombs dropping--can be almost absurdly beautiful. I feel this sometimes, especially on a sunny day and I look up and think "man how lucky we are to live in world where our sky is so blue."

Paul writes that shortly after his partner's diagnosis,  a friend told him "Fight to seize the day. Call someone worse off than you. Engage."

I do have good days now, even a bunch in a row, but when a bad day wells up, almost always unexpectedly, this is a good reminder.

I have so much to be thankful for. My best friend of ten years is asleep and well in the next room. A great place to live. Awesome friends. Supportive (if oftentimes strange and rather crazy) family. Physical affection. And I now officially make my living making people laugh, a childhood dream and my heart's desire.

So I guess even if 3:37 AM is a little early to start, I will fight to seize today.

Recent grief thought #1: When the very kind  anarqueso helped us take down our Christmas tree last year, I cried. Heather patted me on the head and promised "we'll have lots more holidays together." Pudding Day happened less than four weeks later. What holidays? Like President's Day for chissakes?

Recent grief thought #2. I am going to a bereavement group at the gay center and I feel a fierce affection and connection for my Fellow Sad People people. As I suspected, most of them cry on the subway too.

Recent grief thought #3. The aforementioned Fellow Sad People all went to a diner last night after Sad People Group. We were kind of loud and we laughed a lot, actually.  They all report experiences of random aching sadness the timing of which they can never predict. This makes me feel less weird, which my grief counselor of course calls "normalization" and I call a big relief.
.
Recent grief thought #4. I am having such a moment of random aching sadness. Self care, blah blah, meaning in life blah blah, constancy of purpose blah blah, sometimes every bit of me is screaming 'I WANT HER BACK."

This is National Cry Spontaneously Everywhere All the Time Week

To celebrate I am crying spontaneously, everywhere, all the time.

I was telling someone the other day that I have something called cry-o-lepsy. Like I'm absolutely fine, or fine-ish, marching along minding my own business and all of the sudden--I'm crying, with absolutely no warning.

I suppose the good news is that I'm fine, or fine-ish or at least finer when I am not crying, which is an improvement from all day wanting to crawl out of my skin sadness. Even when I wake up and have that "oh, Heather's not here and she never will be" feeling, I am able to poke a little fun at myself and  say  "well and you still are, so get on with things."

Just now I was in the elevator with a woman and probably her grandmother. They had the same good natured teasing interaction I had with my grandma, and all of a sudden, from nowhere, tears. 

For reasons not completely clear to me, the only thing that comes remotely emotionally close--qualitatively if not quantitatively--to losing Heather was my experience of leaving the convent.

Of course, in some ways my experience with Heather represented a lovely "redo" of my convent experience. That is:

NUN EXPERIENCE

Me: Hey, I wanna dedicate my life to service.
God: Awesome.
Me: (jumping in with both feet)
God: Aw you suck, go away.

HEATHER EXPERIENCE

Me: Hey I wanna dedicate my life to service.
Heather: Awesome (although I did have to beg a little and send her 30 nekkid pictures)
Me: (Jumping in with both feet)
Heather: Hey, this is awesome! (jumps in with both feet, even though she has--as she said-- one in the grave)

Not that there weren't some real obstacles for both Heather and I to overcome in our relationship and not that I/we didn't get frustrated sometimes. But the outcome was beautiful.

Anyway, today while I was doing laundry, there was some kind of washer snafu, and my clothes didn't spin dry so I had to wring them by hand before I put them in the dryer. And this reminded me of the Missionaries of Charity and how even the oldest sisters could wring clothes so well they would only need to be on the line for a hot minute in order to be completely dry. This, thanks to a lifetime of hand washing everything. Everything.

Years ago this would have been a sad/regretful memory, but now it just makes me smile. Which gives me hope that one day I will feel that way about my memories of Heather.

Yesterday I went to a support group at Friends Indeed. You may recall that I tried a couple of times to go there and each time wanted to kick someone in the head.  I found it annoyingly condescending.

I tried again yesterday because 1. Their groups are so easy access. You just walk in and sit down. 2. It fit in perfectly with my schedule. 3. The place where the groups are held is quiet and peaceful.

For some reason, I felt totally differently about how the group was run and the process. It's a strange format still (run without crosstalk, but the group facilitator gives a fair amount of actual advice) but yesterday it was helpful.

I know the Portland hospice didn't send out invites for their grief group until 4 months after the death; they explained that before that people are usually too raw to "absorb the group experience." I'm not completely sure what that means, but perhaps this is related.

...my myspace profile to "single" rather than "in a relationship."

Someone on the youngwidow's listserv I'm on said "I'm not single, I'm just in a relationship with someone who isn't physically present."

Uh, yeah, I've done some long distance flings in my time, but this is just TOO long distance for me.

Not that I'm looking to, or ready to, date. anyone other than myself.

But I am ready to have my space profile reflect reality.

Well, more or less reality, since myspace insists on the "single/in a relationship" binary, with a tokenish/slight condescending "swinger" option.

I am sometimes not so brilliant.

In a conversation with technodyke about how hard this stupid grief process is, and how much I feel like it is wearing on me, I said "Yeah, maybe I should just do everything I can to make this first year easier."

To her credit, she didn't say "uh yeah, duh, no shit sherlock." Instead, she just nodded and said "Yes that sounds like a good idea."

I don't think it ever occurred to me in exactly those terms before. And yes, I am sure probably everyone reading this post has already said it to me in one way or another.  It seems obvious right? Going through a rough time= don't make choices that make it rougher. But I guess I'm afraid that if I make it too easy on myself, I won't be able to get my shit together when I need to.  I'm afraid of losing opportunities. And yeah, I'm afraid of people thinking I'm a wimp. This is a fear I thought I had outgrown, but , regression in times of stress and all that.

Anyway, obviously there are some choices that might make it easier short term (like using crystal meth) but would be a disaster long term. Not to worry, that's not what I am talking about.  I'm talking about just adding more fun and pleasure to my life. Sometimes that pleasure might be some kind of "serve the world" kinda stuff, but maybe not. On February 13, 2008 I'll reconsider this plan.

To celebrate, I bought a used copy of "The Hedonist's Handbook" at Powells' in the PDX airport. And then when I got home I put away a bunch of stuff. Heather's stuff. Pictures, her cell phone, her glasses,  the cruxifix she was wearing when she died (it was mine, leftover from the nun days).

I feel ever so slightly disloyal, but mostly relieved. I'll get the stuff out when it makes me happy. For right now it just makes me sad in my own space, and that's not working for me.

Yesterday, on a tip off from my friend R*, T* and I went by the place that Heather and I shared in Portland. I had thought when Heather was alive that maybe one day I could turn it into an alternative performance space, but as soon as Heather was gone it became very obvious to me that was simply not emotionally possible. For me anyway.

Anyway, our old homestead IS an alternative performance space now. It is called Rerarato, which seems to be a made up word

The folks who are running it weren't around, so we just poked around the outside for a bit. And took pictures of course.



Oh and I love that the same haybales Heather and I picked up from a fall festival almost  a year ago are still outside. Still sitting by the side door, still with a coffee cup being used as an ashtray.

Last night I had a doozy of a gig, I earned every single last cent they paid me.  Enough said.
Thursday I performed at a venue I have only been at with Heather (for a woman with advanced cancer she sure as hell got around).
Today, swimming at the pool at Rainbow Mountain (the supergay resort I performed at last night) with D and Z, I felt something I haven't felt for as long as I can remember. I realized it was happiness, happiness unshadowed by illness and imminent death.

Light happiness, I guess, to be more precise, because I had many moments of profound and almost shocking happiness with Heather. But they were never cheap. They always cost us something. The forgetting of the future enabled us to enjoy the present, but we had to come back to it sometime, and the re-rentry could be brutal.

But today, it was sunshine, contentment and the company of people I love.

I haven't heard Heather's voice for a while, I guess since the last time I was able to call her cell phone voicemail and listen to her outgoing message (ie before the cell phone was turned off) a few months ago.

Anyway, I really wanted to hear her voice. And so I remembered there is a clip online of  Heather speaking at the one of the panels for providers at Cancer in Our Lives Symposium in SF last fall.

I listened to it and it felt really good. Her voice is different than I remembered it, higher I guess, and clearer, perhaps than it was at the very end. But still my Queen.

That panel was powerful. Heather was so excited to be able to have the mic and address health providers directly about the good, the bad, and the very ugly bits of care she received over the years.  And tell providers not to dismiss anyone's caregivers as "alternative" because of how they look...that "those fat, tattooed dykes saved my life on more than one occasion."  Heather is third of the presenters, Yosenio Lewis also speaks, as well as Max Beck...they were also AMAZING.

Heather ended her piece of the presentation with an admonition to providers: "Don't mistake our passion for stridency."

Anyway, you can listen to the MP3 file here.

And info about the conference in general is here.

Cross-posted with a slightly different description to kellidunham because I want to share this with everyone.

Perky bubbly friend: What kind of stand up are you working on these days?
Me: Well, I'm trying to write something about how ironic it is that we've evolved to the point that we are conscious of our own existence, and then we spend our whole lives being conscious of the fact that we will die and and we're not sure if our consciousness itself will cease to exist.
PBF: So..you're trying to make that into comedy?
Me: Yup.
PBF (now not so perky or bubbly) Honey, I don't know about making that into good comedy, Some people might think it's not even good conversation.
Me: (scratching head) Huh. Really?
PBF: Uh, maybe, yeah.
Me: How long 'til I'm normal?
PBF: (patting me on head) Hate to break it to you, gooberhead, but you were never normal.
Me: (Smiling) Yeah, um I think you might be right there.

We continue the conversation by talking about the pros and cons of taking the Chinatown to Chinatown bus from Philly to New York.

This morning I was sitting across from 

maurakelly  and singing a tuneless ditty called "I'm so glad I don't feel like crawling in a hole right now." 

It's weird how four terrible days can make you feel so grateful for a day when you are just sad. 

It's also weird how this whole experience with Heather has opened me up, not just to sorrow, but also to joy. 

I got to have breakfast with my sister today. Nothing fancy, nothing super out of the ordinary, but it was just, well, beautiful. The everyday-ness of it. 

The beauty of the moment, I guess, because that's what we get. 

Maybe it's not enough.

But, maybe if we notice each moment, it becomes a bit closer to enough.

---  

Okay, or maybe that's bullshit, but it's definitely helping today.  

 

 

So, you guys know that we lived in a converted Hare Krishna temple, right? And at various times through the months we were there, we would say "thank god for the krishnas" because the house was so perfect for us, at least in many important ways. What is more perfect for a Burlesque Queen than to have her death bed on stage? (it ended up near the stage in the end, but still). And the house was already painted partially in Heather's beloved sunset orange and some other colors that I don't know how to describe but that made us pretty damn happy. It was, indeed, a castle.

It had plenty of room so we had Christmas for our friends, hosted a huge Halloween party and had tons and tons of dinner and overnight guests. It was a great place to live.

And on Pudding Day, our big open living room again was full of our friends as Heather held court and said her goodbyes. And in that way, it was a great place to die.

We looked for the Krishnas in Portland, partly because we were curious about why they left the temple, and also to thank them for what they did to make the place awesome, even though they did it many years before we moved in. But we never found them, and Heather a couple of times reminded me "well when you see them on the street, tell them, okay?"

On Friday afternoon I saw some Krishas in Union Square, so I pulled one of them aside to do that BUT I started crying before I could even begin the story.  I settled down after a minute and hopefully the guy understood the story more or less. I realized it was kind of a intense thing for a random crying stranger to share on a sunny summer Friday afternoon but he seemed really touched and asked if he could hug me. 

And so me and the Krishna dude hugged.

..that I've settled into a nice routine here at deathcomedyjam. I complain about how shitty I feel when I am having a bad day. And when I not so tormented, I post a happy Heather memory.

I'm having a good day. So here's my good day post, as told to  technodyke last night.

KelliDunham (7:14:47 PM): hey have I told you about when the guy got hit on his bike on 42nd avenue?it was literally the night Leah arrived [February 10]

I totally forgot about this until I was walking around Union Square this afternoon and the whole interaction just popped into my head unbidden, like a strange fairy visitor.

Scene: The infusion center at OHSU.
Heather was nearly asleep after receiving IV ativan because she had severe nausea, but she stirred a little and I rubbed her hand and said softly "do you need anything?" She made a non committal sound, so I followed up with "well, if you need anything I'm right here. I'm glad you're able to sleep." I apparently blathered on with an awkward attempt at comforting niceties, because after a few moments her eyes popped open wide and she said "what the hell are you, the chemo whisperer or something?"

And I laughed so hard that one of the nurses came over because she thought perhaps there was something wrong because, well puking was expected in the infusion center, but laughter not so much. Apparently.

Some SF Dyke March action on youtube, with a pic of Heather sporting a beautiful grin (and a beautiful outfit) at the 6:14 mark.