Archive for August, 2014

11 Months

Written by RJ on . Posted in Healing

It was all so easy before. Everything was stable, decided, determined, and understood. When Coleen was alive, it was all so different. I realized how different things have become since she died 11 months ago today. I realized it when I was kneeling at her grave site trying to talk to her and hoping that she was somehow hearing me. I make decisions now that I would have never dreamed of making before. I won’t say that Coleen made all of our decisions because she didn’t. Most of them we made together by discussing and compromising. Many decisions I have to make now would have never presented if she was still alive. Our lives together were established and fairly routine. Not boring, just every day items that you get accustomed to after 33 years of seeing each other day. I never had to decide what to do for holidays or what to buy for a gift. Now I decide what food to buy, where to go on dates, what family parties to attend, where to go for holidays. I have an opportunity to spend Thanksgiving in Florida with Ruth Ann and her family and I am deciding on doing that or doing what I have done for the last 30+ years. Tough call which of course I would never had to make with Coleen. I have been with people I would have never met before. I have an entirely different set of people in my life since Coleen was here. My affiliation with the Buffalo Wellness Center and the Breast Cancer Network of Western New York as a member of their Board of Directors has enabled me to meet brand new people. And they are all very enthusiastic and passionate about their work and their cause. It is a pleasure to be around such upbeat and committed people. I have also recently met a wonderful woman who I am getting to know better. This weekend she invited me to a wedding where I met her entire family and it is a big one. My affiliation with Coleen’s family has waned somewhat since she has been gone. People get busy, myself included, and we just don’t seem to get together as much. Part of my problem is my relationship with my girlfriend because I can not yet introduce her to people like Coleen’s parents or other family members. So I can’t really combine things like I would like to. I want that to change and expect it to shortly.:00 I do things I would have had neither time nor inspiration for. Today, on the 11 month anniversary of her death, I spent much of the morning writing a song. That’s right, a song. Words and music, verses and a chorus. Not only was it a song but it was a love song but not for Coleen. I feel guilty about that but then I don’t. Then I decide that I really don’t know at all how I should feel about it. Truth is, I am happy whenever I write anything and to wake up and write a song is amazing to me. The inspiration moving me to do that seems cosmic to me. Almost like it is some kind of divine force willing me to figure out the words and emotions and feelings and then to somehow fit all that around a few guitar chords that make up a rough melody. I’m not sure I get how that all works but I guess I don’t have to. My favorite musical artist, Neil Young, speaks about something he calls “the Muse.” It is the force that visits him when he writes a song and the source for his inspiration. He says that when the muse is suddenly present, he makes himself alone and lets the song happen. Neil claims that he is the conduit between the muse and the recording and that the song writes itself. I felt a little bit like that today although Neil makes money with his songs and so far, I’m just making videos for my girlfriend. It is hard to fathom that I have been 11 months now without Coleen. The only thing harder will be when I have been one year without her. And that is coming up all too soon. On July 18 which was the 10 month anniversary, I actually forgot about it. I woke up the next morning and realized that I missed the 18th. I have done that one time earlier this year and felt badly about not acknowledging those days. After last months mistake, I set an appointment in my iPhone to remind me at 8:00 AM on August 18 that it was 11 months that day. Kind of ridiculous that I would have to do that I suppose but I would rather rely on technology than forget another month. Maybe in a way it’s a good thing to forget once in a while. Maybe it’s a little sign of progress on this journey. I will never forget my Coleen and I won’t need to set an appointment reminder for next month.
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My New Bedroom

Written by RJ on . Posted in Healing

A few months after Coleen passed away, I rearranged our/my bedroom. It was the last room in the house to go through changes because I always considered it the most sacred part of our house. After all, it was the place where we had our most intimate moments and by that I don’t mean sexually. It was where we shared the most of ourselves and talked about our fears, dreams and secrets. We cried there, we laughed, we argued and we planned. For a long time after she died, I did nothing to that room except clean it, make the bed and change the sheets. I left the rest of it intact as it was the day she left it for the last time. There were books stacked on the floor with random magazines mixed in. The tope of her dresser was cluttered with medicine, jewelry, perfumes, notes, and all kinds of miscellaneous items. I got rid of the medecines and all things that had to do with sickness and cancer but I left everything else. Then one day, probably during the fifth month without her, I started thinking about changing the bedroom. So I did. It wasn’t drastic but I moved the bed to another location and put a different comforter on it. I moved a dresser and the television. I took down a big mirror and replaced it with a print I have of the 16th hole at Augusta National where they play the Masters golf tournament every year. I changed a couple of other wall hangings. I grew to like the new look and for some reason it made me feel like I was making progress with my healing. Whether it really helped or not wasn’t important. Only that I thought it did. Eventually I removed all of Coleen’s things from the room. Her books, her clothes, her notes. Then later I even took our brass bed down and traded it for a queen bed without a headboard that had been in a guest room. It became my room which was kind of ironic because Coleen always referred to our bedroom as “my bedroom” as in “Oh I think I left that up in my bedroom.” We always joked about that. I am writing all this because two days ago I re-rearranged what is now my bedroom. I don’t know why I did it but I had an overwhelming urge to put things back where they had been. Something was suddenly haunting me about what the bedroom had become. It was darker and a little more masculine because of a brown comforter on the bed. The bed itself was too big and looked stupid without a headboard and footboard. So I took down the queen bed. I reinstalled our/my brass bed in the exact same location we always had it and I put the off-white comforter back on the bed. I rehung the artwork on the wall behind the bed and put the pillows with the red shams back where they came from. Some of the other furniture is in a different place than when it was in Coleen’s bedroom and I have different art on the walls but it feels more like it used to. It’s the same in some ways but different enough in others. Why did I do that? For one thing, it looks a lot better. I like the look and feel of it. I am sleeping in the same place I did when she was alive, when she was in bed with me. Coleen will never be back but someone else will and I feel that I need to make room for her and to make it right for her. The room seems pure now, like it’s ready for a new beginning. It’s not a virgin bedroom but it appears fresh and revitalized. I very much like how it looks now and I am very careful to take care of it and keep it especially neat and pristine. It is a special room to me and it always will be. My bedroom is like so much of my life now. The same only different. I like things like that. People used to tell me about something called a “new normal” and I was never sure what that was supposed to mean. I guess I am getting closer to that though without fully understanding it.
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Fields of Flowers

Written by RJ on . Posted in Discovery

There has been a guitar sitting in my house for quite some time now. About two weeks ago I decided to do something about it. I started playing it again. I use the word “again” because years ago I kind of taught myself a few chords and played a little. I was never very good and had no confidence to play in front of people. But I did have enough basic knowledge and ability to purchase and own a guitar. So I did that. After a while I grew frustrated with my lack of progress as a great guitar player and lost interest in playing.

About that same time my son Patrick, then a teenager, picked it up. He was a natural and quickly figured out the secrets to the instrument that I could never conquer. He was good enough to write some songs and perform at open mike nights around town. His singing voice was much different from the way he spoke and it was interesting to hear him play and sing. His recent living excursions in New York City and now Savannah, GA have left him without either extra space for a guitar or apparently the desire to play it. So my old guitar, which he inherited, has been lying around my house for several months. It had been unused but always visible and many times when walking past it I have been tempted to pick it up.

There were three recent events that inspired me to start playing again. On July 8 one of my favorite bands, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, released a new recording. Actually it was a very old recording of a concert tour they did in 1974 but released now for the first time. It has 40 songs on it plus a DVD video of eight songs. I was inspired by the sheer talent those guys had and the way they played each other’s songs in that group setting. I had heard the songs before but not with the passion and enthusiasm I heard them when I listened to the new/old recording. And to see the video of those eight songs took me right back to that year when I saw them perform in Cleveland during that tour. Hard to believe that all happened 40 years ago and hard to rationalize where all that time went. And why I was waiting all those years to play guitar again.

One of my frustrations when I played before was my lack of ability to properly tune my guitar. As all instruments do, my guitar would lose its proper tuning and I just did not have an ear for correcting that. So I would ask people to help me or take it to a music store and ask them to do it. Eventually, I was able to purchase a battery operated tuner which worked to a certain degree. When I decided to pick up my guitar again, I immediately considered my previous tuning dilemma and started to search for the electronic tuner. Of course I had no idea where it might be and did what I should have done in the first place: Look for a guitar tuning app for my iPhone and iPad. I found several and installed what looked like the best one and my tuning problem is no longer a problem. I simply bring up the app, hit one string at a time and turn the peg until the app screen shows green and I am in tune. I am always in tune.

My third inspiration is either a woman or myself. Or more likely, a combination of the two. Girls like guitar players and they like singers and although I am neither of those things, I am suddenly not afraid to try. When I played before, nobody was really interested in hearing me and I wasn’t very interested in being heard. But in this incarnation of me, I am not only able to play and sing for someone but I am actually eager to do so. It’s not like I think I’m any good either. I have just started to get calluses back on my fingertips and while playing, I make lots of mistakes and sometimes forget the words. I don’t care though and I don’t think my audience does either.

So an interesting thing happened to me just a few mornings ago. I was still in my first cup of coffee when I grabbed my guitar and started strumming a few random chords. I had these words come out that started with “I’m seeing things through her eyes …” then some other words and I started writing things down and more words happened and I wrote those down too. A couple of hours later I had enough to call it a song and I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I have heard about writers being gifted with streams of creativity out of nowhere. Some call it the muse. Whatever it was, it happened to me that day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not signing a recording contract and what came out of me that morning is not that good. But I don’t care about that because it’s mine and it’s exactly what I wanted a certain someone to hear. That evening I took my guitar to her house and played her “Fields of Flowers” and she loved it. I mean LOVED it. And even though I was pretty nervous and made a bunch of mistakes while playing it, I loved singing it to her. And as if that wasn’t enough, I made a video of me playing the song and posted it online so she could watch it and also just because I could.

I have never done that before for anybody. None of it. Part of the new me? Discovery? I don’t know. Some things are just so easy for me now. Things that would have been have challenging before just seem so natural now. Things that seemed so far away, so unreachable are now at my fingertips. Things nobody was interested in suddenly have meaning. And it’s all just so much fun.

Fields of Flowers from Rob Jones on Vimeo.

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