Painful.

Having flashbacks is not my idea of a good time.  If I was going to have them why don't the good parts flash  too?
Mr Footless was the love of my life.  With all the mess and horrible of the last few years I did in fact love him.  One of the deal breakers of the last bit of being where I have been is simple.  Insulin Shock.
I don't know and will never know how much of the last  few years of crazy was a piece of manipulation and actually under some control and how much was Mr Footless's  weird metabolism going entirely bonkers because of age and slow deterioration. 
Whatever the answer was, Mr Footless was in and out of Insulin Shock several times a month.  He was so brittle that I could be talking to him and have him suddenly go into convulsions with a glucose level of 25 or thereabouts.
I was on first name basis with the EMT s and fire guys from the local ambulance station. I can't count how many times that I had six to ten big guys in my bedroom reviving my spouse to cart him off to the emergency room only to have him go through the whole thing a week or so later.
Nothing that we tried to bring things under control worked, absolutely nothing.
It was exhausting, it was terrifying, it was horrible and I realize now that He never experienced any of it. 
I was on the outside of the crazy having to do what needed to be done and dealing with having my home invaded by people who might not have paid attention but still saw and judged the chaos that we were living in. Then I would have to deal with someone who was pretty much in pain and battered up from convulsions plus being humiliated and angry from having a whole lot of guys in his space when he was not dressed for company.
  But for him, the actual experience was a blank.  I was terrified out of my gourd with these episodes and he was entirely unaware of what it was like for  the people who were there to go through this.
I understand now that I have developed a whole lot of strength, a calm head, and the ability to let go of any sense of embarrassment about what this must look like to the casual observer or any need to apologize for any of it.
I had to deal with it, but I didn't need to die of embarrassment because Mr Footless was having/being a problem. It wasn't my illness.  My illness was the codependency that made me unable to not participate in this incredible dance with death.
I walked out because I was unable to stay and survive.  If I had stayed, I have no idea if I would have been able to come out of this with my health and sanity intact.  It was  unbelievably hard, I wanted to go back every single day to stay.  I just couldn't.
And now he is dead, He is buried, and the hoard is being disbursed.  The house is coming back together. 
So what have I gained through all of this?
Strength.
Calm in the face of Chaos
Unflappablilty
A low tolerance for some kinds of crazy.
I know that I was not alone in any of this.
 I am not alone  now in this.
I am safe.
I also know that I would rather be alone all the rest of my life rather than ever let that kind of insanity into my life again.
 

So that's what it is

I have been really upset and really vulnerable this last few days.  one of my clients mentioned that she has been having flashbacks and I suddenly figured it out;  I have been waking up in a panic at 4:00 in the morning having insulin shock flashbacks since Mr Footlesses birthday.  I am finally safe enough to be terrified.  Oh goody.

Dear Mr Footless

Today was your birthday. You would have been 75. Your daughter and I spent a lot of time talking this weekend about the last year and a half, and what that was like for us.  The words that she used were Compassion and Grace.  I understand now that you were in the depths of paranoid dementia.  Neither one of the two of us can figure out how much of it was drug induced and at this point it really doesn't matter if it was opioid use or brain shut down that made you so entirely impossible to deal with.  Over all I am glad that you  are gone.  I loved you for most of the twenty three years we were married.  Out of twenty seven, that's not a bad ratio.
I am still dealing with the hoard, the house is still in progress, but the things that you could not deal with or do are being done.  The family things are back where they belong and the records of the mess have been burned, shredded, or mulched.
 I miss you.  I miss the man I married, who was my friend, partner and support and whom I dreamed some mighty dreams with.
I am so glad that you got to see your Grand daughters graduate from high school and go on to be functional people in the world.  They all are regular working folks, holding jobs and supporting themselves. 
You got to see my boys graduate from college.  That was a big dream for you too.  The dings and pain were there, and both of them have needed help to get past the pain but both of them have been doing the work they need to do.
I am still in limbo.  I still am focusing on the cleanup and not on my "proper" work but I still have some recovering to do.  The last year of your life plus the year before that took it all out of me and while I held things together I was just scraping by. 
Wherever you are please keep a loving eye on the Swordsman and Thursdays Child, They need whatever help that you can give them.
The Erstwhile Child will be getting married soon, please keep and eye out there as well.
I love you , I miss you.
wherever you may be please think of me
Love, Dances

Getting the next thing done

Sometimes getting unstuck is the best thing I can do. These  two weeks I got several kidney stones in the way of progress out of the way.

• the tree trimmer came in with The Grande Dame and took out all the brush, pruned the apple tree and took down the weed elms that were growing where no elms had any business growing He left with his ginourmous dumptruck full to the rails with the chips from all the brush and branches.  Tree Trimmer guy is good with trees and inexpensive for what he does, as long as he is under supervision of The Grande Dame.  She has warned me that I must not use him if she is not supervising because he may show up either drunk or hung over.  That's just fine with me, She knows what she is doing.

• The claw foot tub and the fireplace insert are out of the basement and left in the company of Habitat who also took some awkward pieces of furniture and they will be back for the tools when  I get them sorted.
• The power chair and the diabetic equipment are going next, so the main floor is getting ready for carpet (bleagh) removal and then for paint and the laminate installation.
• The Grande Dame and I have removed 3/4 of the very last of the heaps of wooden detritus that were in the yard. Most of it was too big for us to move until I cut it up into manageable pieces. never underestimate the joys of a power saw
• After surveying what I would need to do now and in the future, I have decided that this is the last dumpster load I will have. The Dumpster itself is leaving.

  I have finally and at last come to the place where anything I need to throw out can be taken to the dump in my truck.  I have run out of massive quantities of things that I have to dispose of .  It took six months, but the majority of the mess outside and in has been cleaned up.

It still looks like a disaster in slow motion but it is a much improved disaster and I have learned how to cope with an overwhelming project. (saw it up)

Any one know someone who needs a whole lot of vinyl records? I have five copies of everything  Linda Ronstadt ever recorded and three of Tammy Wynette in gold Spandex and the bouffant from bride of Frankenstein.
Right now I am going to get cleaned up and eat, and then I am going to go out and dance,to celebrate my unstuckness.

I have a new best tool

The weather suddenly got nicer than it has been for way too long. Sunny weather and the mess outside is more compelling than the mess inside.  My friend who takes no prisoners came over to help and advise me on lilac pruning.  Apparently there is very little to it really, it is a matter of removing all the old growth and the dead branches and then letting the tender green whips grow up and out,
OK, so you take something that looks like this

and then after you are finished it looks like this

 

The amount  of brush this generates is amazing

That is just one lilac's worth of branches, and that isn't all of it.
Anyway, the tool that does this with a minimum of fuss and bother is a Sawsall.
It's my new friend.

Well what on earth is that?

Today I managed to get the flake board in the front yard sawn up and in the dumpster. The flake board was sitting on top of a two by platform and was used in the first part of sorting the mountain of trash, from the mole hill of good stuff when we can tell the trash from the good stuff. It's not always easy to tell.
So I was hauling the boards off and looked down into the two by foundation.... The more I looked the more elaborate it got, and it took a while to really understand it.  I was looking at a mouse estate.

There were three nests, and a whole complex of tunnels and what looked like a couple of store rooms divided up by the foundation boards that kind of set it up with walls or hedges. There under the platform was a fairly large mouse city, or perhaps a village.

It looked a bit like what you find when you turn a rock over and watch the ants frantically haul off the goodies that were under there, only much larger in diameter. I wondered where the mouse colony that was living in the junk on the back patio had got to.
Looks like they moved house into the platform.  I wonder where they will end up now because the platform is next to be leaving.
I hope that it doesn't rain or snow until I can take a picture of it.

Strange story

Mr Footless died close to midnight  on a Thursday. I called no one because I didn't see any need for anyone to lose sleep who didn't have to.
The next day I talked to MyMom (among others) who was having troubles of her own. She had just been flooded out of her apartment the week before and had found  a place to roost in Camp Stuffy, the senior living facility she graces with her residence.. She got settled in a meeting room where she had just the essentials. ( I visit her on the weekends which is about what I can manage) Making sure that she had adequate housing had been part of the alarums and excitements of the week before. Also due to the floods I had not been able to go see her.
The roads being washed out and therefore closed does that.
After telling Mom about Mr Footless, there was a silence on the other end of the line. "Well" She says,"Are you coming down to see me this Saturday?"
I said that I would indeed be seeing her then." Good" She says."I need some things from the store."
Alrighty then.
 By Saturday morning a good friend did the research for me, and got me in touch with a coffin maker in one of the towns south of here and north of MyMom.  So I stopped on my way south and picked up the coffin which the maker kindly roped down in the back of my truck. Lucille has a tool box in her bed that shortens the bed by a good two feet so the coffin was propped up on the tailgate, large as life and twice as natural and obviously exactly what it was.
 So I rumble on into Snooterville to meet up with MyMom and do what needs to be done in terms of grocery and basic needs shopping for an eighty plus lady who has been rendered temporarily unhomed.
 After picking up some of the basics MyMom decided she wanted to eat somewhere that wasn't the dining room at Camp Stuffy. That's ok, I have no connection with my body at this point and so I am eating when I think I might need to refuel because I can't tell if I am hungry unless I am so ridiculously low blood sugar I am about to faint.  I'm not fainting yet but it has been a while so eating would be good, right?
My Mom decides on the restaurant, and off we go to a medium high end place at about three in the afternoon.  I had forgotten about the coffin in the back of Lucille as an actual coffin, and started seeing it as the visual obstruction in the middle of the rear view mirror, causing me to use the side mirrors more and the rear mirror a lot less.
If I had been thinking about something besides getting MyMom into the closest parking place so that she had the shortest trudge for her knees, I might have considered the effect of my somewhat battered truck and it's macabre cargo a little more and not parked center front  in the windows of the medium high end place MyMom wanted to eat at.
You would think that waitstaff would be too busy to look and had seen too much of everything that living in a town with Snooterville U could come up with to be at all interested in my load.
Aparently not.
We eat, and we head out to discover a group of people standing around the bed of my truck and speculating on what I might be going to do with the obvious coffin in the back.
I lacked a sense of humor  right then, or I might have had some fun. As it was I packed MyMom up and headed back to Camp Stuffy.
It wasn't until quite a while later that I thought about the effect it must have had on the people watching to see my show up with a coffin and a little old lady.
Mr Footless had a sense of humor that was both pretty black and bizarre. He would have gotten a good laugh over that.