I am nursing a beast of a head cold and sitting here in bed trying to decide the best way to deal with all of my writings and musings from the last year. As all of you are aware, I lost Tommy, my life partner, unexpectedly this last April. This is the second time I’ve been widowed. My first partner, Steve, died in 2001. One of the things I learned in recovering from Steve’s death is that writing about my thoughts, memories and feelings helped me to process what had happened to me and so I began to write prolonged posts for Facebook after Tommy fell ill. It was a way for me to update friends and family, a way to sort out what was going on in my head, and a way for me to creatively cope with a cruel situation.
Another thing I learned from losing Steve was that travel is healing for me. This led to me taking some time off work and road tripping across the country and back. It has also led to me starting to book a number of exotic trips so I can start working my way through my life list of things I want to see before I die. As I am currently traveling alone, I have no one to debrief with at dinner about the day and what I have seen and what my impressions are so some of my writings have taken the form of public travelogue so that others can comment and fill in the gap.
When I took stock of what I have been writing at the first of the year, I realized I had written nearly 100 essays of varying lengths. They run the gamut from discussions of the ephemera of my usual day to thoughts on culture and politics to descriptions of places I have wandered off to stories of my past. There’s enough material there to make something interesting. I don’t know yet if it’s memoir or book or performance piece. The first thing it is is this blog, a place I can put them all, start categorizing, and let anyone who is interested start getting a sense of who I am and how I manage to cope with pain and loss.
The plan is to put all of the pieces I have written so far here in chronological order. I’ll do a little editing and clean them up some as I reread them. I tend to write very quickly in a stream of consciousness style so when I go back and look, at times I cringe and find I have to change things somewhat to make me sound less stupid. Once they are in order, I’ll open this up to inquisitive eyes and suggestions for what else this material might become.
So buckle up, here we go…. and don’t forget your towel.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 