The top light (turning signal) shorted, but I didn’t know this because the socket and seal were covering it up. All I knew was that the bulb was out, so I spent far too long in the parking of Canadian Tire on Saturday trying to wrench it out without breaking everything.

It took AGES just to get the tail light off the car — lots of tugging and banging — before I even started working on the socket. The socket, however, proved to be impossible. I don’t like asking for help, but eventually I gave in and asked a guy in the parking lot to help me. I have very strong hands (for a female), but it wouldn’t give at all. That should’ve been the first indicator that it had shorted and the reason we couldn’t get it out was because the plastic had warped, but even the guy hadn’t thought of that. He finally threw in the towel and suggested I take it into Canadian Tire to see if they could extract the socket without breaking it.

Even the guy at the parts desk couldn’t budge it, so he had a mechanic get it out, which was no swift feat. I could buy the bulb at Canadian Tire, but they didn’t carry the socket. Time to go to the dealer, but by the time all this had transpired the dealer was closed. Between the malarkey in the parking lot yanking off the tail light, messing with the blown socket, several trips to the parts counter to track down parts, and standing in queues between each trip, I don’t want to see a Canadian Tire again for a long, long time.

Fast forward to Monday. The dealer has the socket and bulbs, but I tried it all out in the parking lot again and it turns out the plastic is too warped to accommodate the socket. It took a mechanic to get the old one out, but it would take nothing short of a blowtorch to make it all fit together again. It’s $200 for a new tail light (NO WAY!), plus the socket and bulb ($37+). Time to go to the autowreckers, but by the time we sort this out the autowreckers is closed.

Now Tuesday. I called the autowreckers to find a used tail light — including bulb and socket — but the guy I spoke to neglected to tell me he had to order the part. He told me he thought he could locate the socket I needed, so I went in for that and paid for it all but it turns out I have to go in AGAIN to pick up the tail light on Wednesday. It was $75 plus tax for the part, but he didn’t charge me for the sockets or bulbs he found. Still a bargain compared to what the dealer would charge for it all, though.

I stood in the parking lot of the autowreckers holding a pile of bulbs and wires and sockets, and decided that I couldn’t go yet another day without a left turn signal. I’ve already made ridiculous wide circles of right-hand turns to get to all these places. (Drivers don’t pay attention to hand signals, especially at night.) So I did what David would do in this situation: I pried off a socket from one of the sliced wire harnesses with a screwdriver and bound that socket to the tail light with duct tape, careful to keep the bulb free and clear of any plastic or duct tape. I tested it, and it works! I have an early morning airport run, part of it in the dark, so this will do the job nicely for one more day.

Today I pulled my wedding dress out of its storage container, hung it up, and took a few photos of it before I sent it on its way.

There’s a lot of emphasis on the wedding dress as a symbol of marriage, because for the groom a tuxedo can be worn for other occasions. A wedding dress simply can’t be mistaken for anything else, especially if it has a train. Anyone can spot a wedding a mile away once that dress comes into view.

When I was at The Brides’ Project over the weekend, they told me as with all private donations I could write a letter to accompany the dress, which would only be opened once the new owner claimed it. Every dress has a story, and mine is no exception. But mine is such a big story that I don’t know if I could tell it in a letter format. After all, I’ve been writing in this website for years and I don’t think I’ve finished telling our story.

I was thinking I could write an open letter here and just put the URL in the letter with the dress. Maybe other brides-to-be will see it, and think about what it means to walk down that aisle. I don’t believe you have to get married to make the commitment to love and care for someone the rest of your lives, but if you choose to get married the highest level of commitment will be expected of you, and only you will know if you can live up to it.

Three years down the road, I can honestly say I would probably pick the same dress if I could do it all over again. The shop owner told me flat out that it was all wrong for me, but I didn’t listen to her and tried it on, anyway. Once I saw myself in it I knew this would be my wedding dress, and once she saw I was right about the dress she stopped trying to talk me out of it. There are some things in life I am certain of, and choosing that dress was one of them.

The other was marrying David Fielding, in spite of everything that happened since. My only regret is not meeting him sooner, because then we would’ve had more time together. Maybe we would’ve even had a child together by now.

It’s taken three years, but I’m finally ready to let the dress go, to make someone else happy on her wedding day, and benefit a child or adult dealing with cancer. It’s taken me a while to find a sense of purpose again, and now the dress can begin its own new journey, too.

I spent Saturday afternoon at a house on Broadview Avenue here in Toronto, documenting the search for a wedding dress for a photography client and getting a firsthand look at how The Brides’ Project works.

It all started with an email from Haida last week, inviting me to accompany her on a bridal-themed weekend which included trying on wedding gowns and attending a bridal show. She sent along a link to The Brides’ Project and I was intrigued by the concept as this is something I’d never heard of before but wished was around when I was shopping for a wedding dress in ‘04/’05, even before cancer had touched my own life in such a personal way.

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“Christmassy” sushi, click to view larger

Yes, a caterpillar roll. Flying fish roe on thin slices of avocado wrapped around rice, seaweed, and barbecued eel. After a mild bout of food poisoning (chicken) I laid off the animal protein, but I justified this craving as I have never fallen ill from sushi. In fact, never fallen ill from raw foods at all, only suspect chicken. I love chicken, but maybe it’s time chicken and I parted ways once and for all.

Anyway, I ramble on about food but the point of this post is to point out that this is the closest to anything Christmas as I will get this year. Maybe every year. I’m not going to prognosticate how I’ll feel about Christmas in the future, but I know how I feel about it now: I just want it to be over. I wish I could escape to a communist country again this year, but I have neither the vacation days nor the funds so we’ll see where I end up. Even I won’t know until then.

On Friday I came to the astounding realisation that I have not worked over Christmas holidays since 1996. 1996! No wonder it’s extra painful to figure out what I’ll do. Last year I was temping, and took off the second half of December; my last day was the 15th. The next day I booked a flight to Cuba and drove to Pennsylvania. When I worked for Equity Research, we never worked over Christmas week and resumed work after New Year’s. Even before I worked for Equity, I booked off Christmas week and didn’t return until January.

I bit the bullet and booked off December 24 without pay so I can have five days off in a row. I still have to work December 27, 28, and 31.

I haven’t written about David for a while, but in the past six months I have thought about him daily, especially when I was travelling. Strangely, the more I think about him the less I write about him, because the further in time I am from his death the further I am from being able to explain how someone who is dead could influence my day-to-day life. So I don’t bother. It’s the same feeling when I return from a big trip and people in passing ask, “So how was your trip?” and I automatically say, “It was great!” because I’m not going to bother getting into any details with 98% of the people who happen to know I was gone. “How are you?” is consistently greeted with “Fine, thanks, and you?” New York City, Reykjavik, Montreal, Havana — all “great!” I’m not lying, but I’m only going to give a vague response because, really, that’s what most want or expect. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

And the same with Christmas. I wish I could just LOOK like a Hasidic Jew so no one would ever ask me about Christmas ever again. No Christmas cards, no gift exchanges, no secret Santa, no Christmas tree, it would just be understood that I don’t celebrate it and it is just like any other day. Except that it is not just like any other time, it is in fact the worst time of the year for me, the culmination of a very hard struggle through October and November and one last-ditch effort to get through December. Last year I stayed at home as much as possible, this year my strategy has been to keep myself as busy as possible. Yet, the sadness does not ever go away, it just gets glossed over because as I am continually reminded in some way or another, life takes precedence over death.

I can’t wait for January. Only 27 days to go.

Wednesday, May 30
NY Yankees 10, Toronto Blue Jays 5

This is what the Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome) looks like with the roof open. I’m moving tomorrow, after a year with this view from my balcony at night facing east. I can’t say I’ll miss living next to a 55,000-seat baseball stadium. I’ve still not seen inside it.

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I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I was here — ‘here’ being Birmingham, England. On the left is Selfridge’s, a department store that’s part of the Bullring shopping centre, and the church is in a nearby courtyard, newly restored.

I flew from Hamburg to London on March 26 last year to spend Mother’s Day dinner in Wolverhampton with Lucy and her family, and I laughed as I re-read this entry* about lapsing into a food coma afterwards and telling the UK Immigration officer that the purpose of my visit was a big dinner. I was absolutely knackered, as Vinny’s memorial was the day before and I was up late printing out photos for his classmates and burning CDs of the presentation. I’d pulled an all-nighter because Berit and I had to leave at 6 o’clock in the morning to get back to the same airport where we held the memorial so I could fly to London. That whole day was a blur.

The next day, however, was much more lucid and it was mostly like old times. I can only say ‘mostly’ because those weeks I was in Europe last year was not for a holiday, and sometimes it seemed I couldn’t enjoy myself because I couldn’t stop thinking about David and Vinny. Everywhere I looked, it reminded me of them and how the world seemed less colourful and much emptier without them in it.

David was fond of a saying — I don’t know the origin of it — that goes something like this:

You can’t help what you feel but you can help what you do.

Yesterday, for some reason, I felt like making some phone calls, so call I did. I was on the phone for hours, longer than all the phone calls I’ve made recently and added together, to people I had been incommunicado with for many months. In the last year and a half I carried on mostly an internal dialogue. I had plenty to say but lacked the emotional energy to make a simple phone call.

It was such a relief to be able to talk freely at last. It’s not that these friends were unapproachable in any way, it was because it took me a while to find my voice again, to feel any sort of excitement about the future; to feel up to the task of making plans. Strange though it may sound, it is an arduous, frustrating, patience-testing process to feel like a normal human being again, on a daily basis. Little by little, it is happening.

* Although I’m very sorry to report that Terry, Vinny’s 15-year old greyhound shown in that photo, passed away last December. Yes, December was a rather crap month, not just for me.

Hours later, I’m still upset. Thanks a lot, Mister Cab Driver, for ruining my evening with your thoughtless words.

I was still at the office at 6:20 and had more to do, but I needed to run home and get something before going to my bereavement group at 7:00. I took a cab. What a big mistake.

The cab driver, after learning that I had relocated to Toronto so I could be closer to Pennsylvania and finding out why, took it upon himself to berate me for not “moving on”.

“Why don’t you go back [to Vancouver]?” he said. “There’s nothing for you in Pennsylvania anymore. Cut your losses and get on with life.”

I have heard this from more people than I care to remember. I’m angry with myself for letting the words of total strangers get to me. I am frustrated because I should’ve seen it coming, and had some scathing remark ready to put him in his place. Or, at the very least, stopped answering his pushy questions!

“I don’t recall asking your opinion on this matter,” I should have said.
“Back off!” — would have cut him off at the pass.
“Why is it any of your business?” — would have ended it then and there.

I don’t know what upsets me more: unnecessarily defending my personal decisions to people who don’t matter, or feeling distressed by their words.

All I do know is that it made tonight’s group very, very hard to sit through, let alone give a monologue about what David meant to me. I wanted to go home. I feel like I’m going backwards, that my skin isn’t getting thicker after all. I can’t remember anything I said. Maybe I’ll remember later, but right now my mind is cloudier than today’s sky over Toronto.

Practically the first thing I see after that last push of the snooze button. This sight is so familiar to me that I felt motivated to photograph it about a month ago, to see if I would interpret it a different way. I gave it a bit of treatment so it’s closer to how I see it in the mornings, with my impaired vision.

Only one more day of work this week. I’ve had a long evening, and I know it will make me very tired tomorrow. It was Week 2 of the bereavement group, and it felt much harder than last week. Probably in light of some news today that brought to mind how much I wish David were alive today and I were not a widow.

Melissa told me while I was in Vancouver the other weekend: “Auntie Gail, [? told me] when you love someone and they die, they stay with you forever.” Very true, Melissa.

It was a “heads up” wedding announcement to our friends and family. David and I designed it together, while I was in Vancouver packing up my apartment and he was in Pennsylvania, waiting for me to come home to him.

Except for the picture of the Tri-Pacer (I think one of David’s cadets took that one), we took the photos ourselves. As one of the radiation clinic nurses said, “You guys were a team.”

View larger.

2007 has been much kinder to me than 2006, but even with all the good stuff happening to me recently, not a day goes by when I didn’t wish with every fibre of my being that I could share it with David. He was always such a great source of encouragement for me, and not having him here makes good news a little less exciting… or incomplete, somehow.

Next week I begin my 10-week program with an adult grief support group. There was no space left for the fall session, at least in the evening, so I’ve had to wait a few months. I haven’t been to counselling for a couple of months or more, but I’m looking forward to trying a small group setting. There are only 8-10 people in each group and each session lasts for two hours, so everyone should have a chance to speak. One issue I had with individual counselling is the 50-minute time limit. That time frame just didn’t seem to work for me — I felt rushed and anxious and under pressure. At least in a group setting, I don’t feel obligated to do most of the talking. As well, the counsellor/patient dynamic is very different from a peer environment, and the latter is what I need right now.

Tomorrow is my last day as an agency temp, and today when I was given my contract paperwork to fill out, there were some spouse forms included in the package. It’s been years since I received benefits, so those pages took me by surprise.

“Oh, I guess you won’t be needing those,” the administrator said, and removed them from the package.

Welcome to widowhood, I thought.

Technorati tags: postcard, wedding announcement

Dear David,

Remember when I took this photograph? It was spontaneous, our first portrait together, October 4, 2004. You were so amazed by this picture:

“I can’t believe that’s me, Gail! You took 10 years off me!”

You were wearing your favourite shirt: a black linen Cuban number, which — come to think of it — was so out of place in your aviation-themed wardrobe.

You said until you’d met me, you’d thought of yourself as an old man. I remember when you said it; it saddened me that you perceived yourself this way. Because I just thought you needed some adventure in your life, and a co-pilot who’d put her hand on your knee now and again. You agreed wholeheartedly, as I recall.

When you took me on our first outing — the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour — and I pinched your bum in the darkness, you knew it was a done deal, right? I think you even yelped, and wore a huge perma-grin on your face despite the fact we were in the murky depths of a coal mine and the tour guide was narrating a grim story about child labour. Nobody understood why you were smiling.

I think that weekend caught both of us off-guard. In a good way.

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