Dear Mike,

(8 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I miss you so much I cannot begin to describe it. Hours drag like eons, yet days pass in a blink. I guess because the hours all seem part of the same day, last Friday when you left us.

I can’t go back and do the show yet, babe. I KNOW, I know, you don’t have to look over your glasses at me like I’m an idiot. You TOLD me I had to keep doing them, that it would make you feel doubly worse if you took that away from me too. You told me you didn’t want to live out your last days like we were all just on death-watch while you were alive. Besides, you really wanted to watch basketball.

We talked about this so much, how I had to buck up and make a life, and I will. But of course, I wish I had been in the room, not just found you. I mean, I ate dinner with you after the show, and you wanted to nap out. Then I went back to the jam room to listen to the show, and fuck around online, and checked like I always did every 15 minutes. You were gone. You told me “not today” damn you… or was that the day before? You asked me in the morning, “Do you really, really love me?” something crazy but so full of genuine childlike need of reassurance, I held you and rocked you for an hour and told you over and over how much I did. That alone should have told me it was going to be the day. But your mind was getting fuzzy from the cancer. And later, you were just normal again.

I miss everything about you, baby. Everything. Ok, stop looking at me like that – not the fucking paperwork pack rat thing, but everything else. Heh. Dick. Look, you’re not even here and you’re making me laugh at myself. I was ready for the mountain of hell financial clusterfuck, I was prepared for the horror of the calling it in process, though I’m still kinda pissed you didn’t get the DNR order in order BEFORE you left. What I wasn’t ready for is the slow agonizing empty empty empty missing you. Evenings are so bad. I’m driving people crazy keeping them on the phone about anything at all, not to fall into the void of despair that the lonely for you made.

Do me a favor, keep visiting Jake in his dreams like you have, just normal stuff, normal conversations. He likes it. My parents pop into mine all the time. We just talk about the daily stuff for a while. I dig that I told you to and you are. Me, on the other hand, I’m not ready. I wouldn’t want to wake up and would be awful upon waking from the brutal reality. Give me time, babe.

At least you still listen when I write, and I can see and hear you now. Ok, tell them not literally, I get it already. But imagining what you would say helps. I think they’ll understand.

Oh, and hey! It was 70 yesterday and I painted my toenails for you just like we joked about for months. You’d have laughed your ass off.

I have my girls all coming to spend the night all the way from Redford; Gwen, Marie, Kerri and maybe Amy to have a yahtzee tournament with Linda and I to help me get through the first Friday. You’d have flirted and loved your harem for an hour, then bolted like the estrogen-overdosed man you were for the other room and basketball. IOW, you ain’t missing nothing tonite…. but we will be missing you.

Love,

Diane

9 comments

Skip to comment form

    • Diane G on March 18, 2011 at 17:09
      Author
    • Diane G on March 18, 2011 at 17:14
      Author

    at the moment, and if you all get sick of me whining publicly, just tell me to shut up, and I will. I won’t, I just won’t PUBLISH them.

    I have to purge it somehow.

  1. Godspeed, Mike; keep writing it, Diane.  It does help in time.

    All those who died before me I thought of as resting…and most of them needed rest sooo much.

    My heart aches for you.

  2. I don’t know how you do it!  

    The feelings of your heart and mind expressing themselves with each moment that passes . . . . not sure I could do it, except, perhaps, in my own mind!

    Writing is a “relief pressure” in so many ways — and gawd knows, you need one in this terribly sad time of loss!

    For me, it’s O.K., Diane — let it “flow.”

    Hugs!

  3. “I cannot even begin to imagine…” I mean it, though it sounds trite and cliche. I say to myself… magnify anything you think you know by 10, by a hundred, and maybe that begins to approach it.

    it is inconsolable, that ache… somehow… accepting that fact almost eases the pain.

    blessing you blessing Jake.

    .

    Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended

    by Edna St. Vincent Millay



    Only until this cigarette is ended,

    A little moment at the end of all,

    While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,

    And in the firelight to a lance extended,

    Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,

    The broken shadow dances on the wall,

    I will permit my memory to recall

    The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.

    And then adieu,-farewell!-the dream is done.

    Yours is a face of which I can forget

    The color and the features, every one,

    The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;

    But in your day this moment is the sun

    Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

  4. some love your way.  

Comments have been disabled.