On June 25th of last year, my life changed irrevocably. On that day, just a few days after his 51st birthday, M passed away in the ICU of a local hospital after a few days on life support. He died from cardiac arrest and multiple organ failure after being diagnosed with early onset dementia back in March of 2019. On June 24th, I had to tell our children their father wouldn't make it, and then the next day, we let him go. Despite the fact that he was almost completely a different person for the last year or so of his life -- a difficult, cantankerous, paranoid, and angry person -- it was still incredibly hard, and it continues to break my heart. That's the short version. I'll add the long version someday, but it's still too hard.
Fast forward ten months and a few days.
So now we are sheltering in place, and for us, it has not been all that difficult or hard to navigate. We're enjoying having more time together as a family, the three of us, and more time to work on long neglected tasks around the house and yard. It's been a chance to feel more connected to the things that matter.
What We've Been Up To
My primary job, with the university, is all from home now. I have been navigating the world of Zoom, Google drives, and more. I am technically working fewer hours but in a more concentrated form. I do actually go to my second job, as a bookkeeper for a small printing company, twice a week for a few hours. It is open as an essential business due to the fact that it largely deals with blueprints, including those for hospital needs such as Covid tents. The Boy works there too, but full-time. He's learned, in short time, printing, scanning, combining and retouching documents, and more. He really likes his job, and he likes his boss, who is a generous man. Classes -- all hands on -- were cancelled for The Boy, so he has the time to work.
Speaking of The Boy, there has been an interesting shift! He rebuilt a car (19963 Toyota Tercel), which is now his commuting car. The process of rebuilding it was a good one, but it also made him realize that while he loves working on cars as a hobby, it is not something he wants to do 8+ hours a day, day in and day out. He's planning on taking more general ed classes in the fall, working toward an Associate's degree in a yet-to-be-decided field. He wants to explore more of the options out there, take some science classes, maybe some engineering. He also has the option of a free ride at any of the California State Universities (one of the perks of my job), so may do that after getting the general ed requirements out of the way.
The Girl decided it was time to focus more on basic academics as well. She's working her way through The Great Courses' Mastering the Fundamentals of Mathematics as a review course, and is working on essay writing. We also re-subscribed to Curiosity Stream, and she loves the plethora of David Attenborough videos that are available! For history, she has been wrapped up in clothing and food through the centuries, something she explores on her own time, largely through historical fiction and YouTube videos. She was volunteering regularly with a local organization that cooks and delivers healthy meals for cancer patients and their families, but with her asthma, she is considered "at risk" right now, and so is staying home.
My class has moved online as well. I'm working on a Master's degree in Education, with a focus on Social Justice & Equity. This was my first semester in the program, and it has been a strange one!
We also play board games, watch movies, cook delicious food (more of it vegetarian than in years past), and just talk.
Plans That Are Afoot
We are finally building raised vegetable beds! My mom's fence collapsed in a storm earlier this year, and as it was being rebuilt, she offered me all the redwood planks. They are a little old, beautifully weathered, and should last me at least a few years. I plan on ordering soil in the next day or two. We are also redesigning the rest of the backyard, which is overgrown with weeds and blackberries, and cluttered with castoffs from M's various unfinished projects.
He was a full-on hoarder the last year+, meaning that we're also planning on getting a dumpster shortly, so that we can have a massive clean-out of the house and yard, and move forward with a more minimalistic style. We have been working diligently on reducing our carbon footprint, and would like to continue doing so. This was something that was once important to M as well, but the dementia took that away from him.
We are slowly cleaning out, deep cleaning, and planning to make the house better for us. The Girl will have the master bedroom once it has been cleaned out, stripped of carpeting, and repainted. I will move from the family room and our Ikea pull-out couch bed (where I have slept for almost two years now) to The Girl's old room. In the short term, we're removing the last remnants of the wall to wall carpeting that covered all the hardwood floors, and repainting the entire interior in a lovely ivory shade (except the kids' bedrooms) called "Yards of Muslin." We decided to go with this as having it all one color will enhance the flow, make it more calming, etc. Light, bright, clean, and fresh. We're deciding between tile and linoleum for the shared bathroom floor -- both have pros and cons. We have to redo the shower plumbing in that bathroom still, and will strip all the old tile (we think it has lead!) off that walls at that point. I've been incrementally replacing furniture with good Craigslist finds, we're downsizing our collection of books as we have an excellent library system, and we're carefully choosing new art to hang once the walls are painted. We will bring in houseplants, sew new curtains, rearrange the few knickknacks we want to keep...
I have missed blogging. In posts to come, and there will be more, I'll include some photos, and hopefully happier stories.