Here’s some quick biographical details so if you’re new to me and my story, you won’t get too confused. I was raised in Seattle, Washington, the eldest child of three. My father was a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and my mother taught various sciences at the local junior college. I grew up in the city proper, just east of the University in a neighborhood which was faculty ghetto at the time my parents moved in but which is far too expensive for that these days. I went to a well regarded prep school, Lakeside, for high school and then headed off to Stanford University for undergraduate (much to the chagrin of my mother who had gone to UC Berkeley). I returned back to Seattle for medical school, and then went back to California and UC Davis for residency, fellowship and my first faculty position in geriatric medicine.

I met Steve (Jon Steven Spivey), my first partner about six months after arriving in Sacramento, finally came out officially (to the surprise of absolutely no one) and we lived there together happily for nearly ten years. In the late 1990s, UC Davis had a melt down, the clinical geriatrics program was caught in the cross fire and I was suddenly out of a job. Ultimately, I took the position I currently hold at University of Alabama Birmingham and Steve and I moved cross country. Steve became ill with pulmonary fibrosis about a year after we arrived and I cared for him for another two years until his death. A year or so later, when I was toying with moving back to the west coast, I met Tommy (Louie Tommy Thompson Jr.) who became my second partner. Together we developed a life in Birmingham full of professional accomplishments and music and theater.

Tommy, who had never had the most robust health, developed serious heart disease suddenly in the spring of 2018, was hospitalized, and died suddenly and unexpectedly from his heart problems. We had fifteen years together, including four of legal marriage. I am adjusting to being alone again. At fifty six, I’m young enough for a third act but I’m too darned tired to train a new husband at this point. I’m going to content myself with my aging self, my aging cats, my aging patients, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, and my theater peeps.

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.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton