w00t w00t booyah

Like most people, I didn't like hearing Steve Jobs had passed. 56 is way too young for anyone to thrown out of this game, and particularly when you are this good at it? Ridiculous. Apple has more money in it than Enron ever did, the products it makes are everywhere and who would question what Jobs did with Disney after Eisner? I mean, really.

The ubiquitous quote taken from that Commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005, you know the one - "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

Wow, that's a great speech. Wonder what the rest of it was like -

"...Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."

Well, then.

Then the reports of the child labor abuses...that are actually worse this year over last...from factories making Apple products. Known problems, had been known for quite some time it would appear.

I hadn't known he was an adoptee - I also hadn't known he was a paternity denier as well. What I do know is that this was a very private person - for good reason. If you're going to be your own person, and damn the torpedoes - you're not going to please everyone.

But to imply that everyone gets old and useless and be grateful Death will get rid of all that?

Is it schadenfreude to note that he stopped working only a few weeks before he died? That he got a really good lesson in Death stealing a vibrant, successful lifespan before he was kicked out of it? I hope so.

Death is a damn thief, at any age. Aging beyond egocentricity isn't wrong. You have the right to follow your heart at any part of your lifespan, not just at the start of it.

So noted by the widow of a electrical electronic engineer who programmed for Voyager at 14 - and died at 36.

Bah.

When somebody reminds you strongly that your late husband is indeed, LATE and not here anymore...

...and you're the only one who knows why this is a Bad Thing...

It's probably a good reason why you've got a lot of free-floating FURIOUS going on.

...

Dammit. I miss him.

You would too, if you knew why.

Carry on, nothing to see here.

When somebody reminds you strongly that your late husband is indeed, LATE and not here anymore...

...and you're the only one who knows why this is a Bad Thing...

It's probably a good reason why you've got a lot of free-floating FURIOUS going on.

...

Dammit. I miss him.

You would too, if you knew why.

Carry on, nothing to see here.

Why yes, I do remember Pearl Harbor.

And I remember looking at the pictures posted at the shrines in Tokyo taken of the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima - pictures I remember I needed a parent's permission slip to see in high school - posted out in the open for everyone to see, granthers to babes in arms. When they get old and weather-beaten, they get taken down and new ones made. Nobody is going to forget.

Believe me. The Japanese remember Pearl Harbor as well. Just - we haven't noticed, or learned much from their experience. But it is there to learn from.

More to the point - it would be 29 years today, if Cliff was still alive (and we were still married). Next year, it will be 15 years - twice over the time we had together. Nine years with Jim.

Boy, has time flown. It does that, I'm told.

And so, another one is lost.

If you know me, you know this hits very close to home.

dsmoen also has her take on this:

* Everyone's grief is different. Don't judge another's process. (Intervene if you believe it necessary to life or sanity, sure.)

* When an outsider might think everything is okay is when it gets really hard. For me, I was in shock for 9 months, and then it got really difficult for another 9. But people thought I should be "over it" then. Ummm, no.

* You're never really over it, you just get better armor with smaller and fewer chinks.

* People grieving may need to express some negative sentiments, such as things they will not miss and things that frustrated them about the deceased. This is normal, and if the person expresses them, it's because they feel it's necessary. It's healing. People don't become saints when they die, and treating the deceased like that automatically means the other party in an argument was wrong or a bad person and it interferes with grieving. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to hear (especially once one gets to the anger stage). Healing first.

* From a friend who'd been both divorced and widowed: she said the primary difference is that, in a divorce, they pack their own stuff. I'd add that, in a divorce, generally there's only two parties arguing over belongings. (My late husband's ex asked for "her" wedding china -- which she'd given up in the divorce -- back. I recognize that she had grief too, but...no.)

* Sometimes the nicest thing you can do for someone is make sure they eat and have someone to be there with, even if they don't say a word.

* Movies can be low stress shared experience because no one feels obligated to talk.

* There's no easy way to crawl up out of grief except one moment at a time. Decide to live for one moment. Try to do something that pleases you for one hour. Thank living through the day. Eventually, it gets better.

* In my case, it permanently changed me. There is no old normal again. There is only a new normal.

* If you are the person who lost a loved one, especially a spouse or life partner, recognize that this is the one time when you might be able to be forgiven for unusual acting out. If you see that from the other end, try to let it slide unless it's actually dangerous.

* Know the symptoms of depression so that you will be able to recognize them. I was going into my doc for something else and read an article about signs. I had none of the primary symptoms and quite a few secondary ones. I started on anti-depressants. In two weeks, I went from being convinced I'd never write another word to writing again. It wasn't great writing, but I was able to have a creative outlet again, which in turn made me even happier.

* A few days before his sudden death, Richard asked me to promise to remarry and be happy if something happened to him. This promise kept me strong in times when I was in a lot of pain, and I think it was a great gift to me at that time.

I'll add a few things.

I don't know if it was a great idea for a mod on an online support group for young widows to have seen me posting a few days after Cliff passed and decided "HAY YOU'RE GREAT YO HERE - YOU MOD NOW BYE BYE" and skedaddled. You know me. Okay. Sure. Thanks for the compliment!

Uh oh.

One of the first things I had to do was shut down group membership sign ups to query-first only - because we were getting spammed with credit card applications and dating trolls. (Hey, we'd all gotten life insurance payouts and HAD to be LONELY. *eyeroll* Slammed that down, yes I did. LOUDLY.)

It's gone very quiet there, and I think I may leave the group myself soon. It's been ten years.

But I got to talk to people who had lost their spouse in car crashes as well as long-term care facilities. There's a key difference: in a sudden death, you have the prep and as well as the cope all at once. It's overwhelming. The aftermath can be something straight out of your worst nightmares, and you face it alone. No warning. Harsh? Oh man. The shock alone will ruin you.

If you have warning (you get a cancer diagnosis, you're dealing with a chronic issue that won't ever get better, or you just wore it out - whatever it was), it changes the landscape a bit.

You can ask. You can get advice. You can get direction.

You can wrap your head around it and start pretending for what will be. Play-act in your head. Try it on.

That's not to say it's easier. Gentler, perhaps. Kinder is relative.

In a lot of ways, it's kind of like someone installing a port into a vein - and moving it on a daily basis to another location TBD. The person dying is doing all the screaming, though. All you feel is the life bleeding out of you. They don't tell you where it will come from. Or where it all goes. It's just gone.

When it ends, all you can do is exhale - grateful that it is over. It gets no worse from here.

Not for them, anyway. And that's been all you've thought about for months. How can you keep it from getting worse...and then, that worry is taken from you.

And the other very wetware effects kick in. If you know what to expect, you warn people.

Don't expect - and don't try - to do more than breathe for 90 days. No, seriously. Don't try to figure out who gets this or that, don't sell the house, give away the pets or sign anything regarding contracts. You will have enough settling the remains - and society has put plenty of very easy-to-follow guidelines with people who know their stuff to help do that. Let them. Have the memorial services. Have the wake, the funeral, the setting free - surround yourself with ritual. They exist for a reason. This is HUGE. They give you time.

Nothing...NOTHING...has to be done right now. I don't care what it is. No, really. Don't do anything. The urge will be there. Fight it down.

Get a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil and carry them with you everywhere you go. Write everything down. Because for the next 45 days, your short-term memory is taking a vacation. You will not retain a damn thing, and there is nothing to do about it - so don't freak out when you notice it happening. This is normal. It will go away.

After the first 90 days are up, the next 45 or so are going to be a lot like a turtle coming out of its shell. You kind of peer out, very slowly, taking stock of what's around you and then you might begin to think about what you're going to do from here. Think about, mind. There is still nothing more with the doing. No, I'm serious. Leave the doing. Pay the bills, keep the plates spinning...but leave the rest for later. There is no hurry now. None whatsoever.

*chuckles* Cliff has been "that little shit" for almost all of the ten years he's been gone.

I didn't do the movie thing, and still don't. When Cliff passed, 'What Dreams May Come' had just come out and Robin Williams movie or not, couldn't see it. Didn't want it. For me, long drives with music and then video games worked better. I brought home a serious amount of stuff from Dave & Busters. Ate a lot of Curry House. Worked a lot of overtime.

They'll tell you the average length of time before you're in another serious relationship - even married - is three years. At the time Cliff passed in 1998, I looked around and went 's'yeah, right' - and then I met Jim in 1999, over a year later. Married in 2001. Um.

I still miss him. I miss the most that nobody around me now knows Cliff - the person I married - at all. (There are a few - very few - people who knew him in his last years. Not the same thing.) I take him with me everywhere I go, every day. I am brave in so many ways because of him. But nobody knows it, or why.

My process is not your process or her process or his process. Grief is a very individual thing, can't be weighed or measured or predicted. The most lasting effect for me is anger. I hated how he had to be told 'this is it' and 'it' was effectively jail in the ground floor of a condo in Ontario with no access to the outside world besides AOL. On dial-up. That's for starters. No trips to wonderful places, no outings into the bright sunshine, no long talks and heartfelt moments. I had to work - and twelve hour days, mind - and people would just shrug and say it would somehow work out. Well, of course it did. It ended!

I tend to get very mulish when I'm forced into anything similar. And I still don't cry much anymore. If I had ever started, I would never have had a reason to stop. And if there was anything I knew well, it was that nobody was coming. If I cried, I would cry alone until I stopped myself. Cliff's caregivers went on with their careers, and damn if I didn't miss them too!

The loss is just the start. You get tripped up by the damndest things. And they take months to show themselves.

I'll go over and drop a note. Hell, I moderated a support group for all those years.

I just wish it wasn't necessary. This just sucks. And I am so, so sorry.

And so, another one is lost.

If you know me, you know this hits very close to home.

dsmoen also has her take on this:

* Everyone's grief is different. Don't judge another's process. (Intervene if you believe it necessary to life or sanity, sure.)

* When an outsider might think everything is okay is when it gets really hard. For me, I was in shock for 9 months, and then it got really difficult for another 9. But people thought I should be "over it" then. Ummm, no.

* You're never really over it, you just get better armor with smaller and fewer chinks.

* People grieving may need to express some negative sentiments, such as things they will not miss and things that frustrated them about the deceased. This is normal, and if the person expresses them, it's because they feel it's necessary. It's healing. People don't become saints when they die, and treating the deceased like that automatically means the other party in an argument was wrong or a bad person and it interferes with grieving. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to hear (especially once one gets to the anger stage). Healing first.

* From a friend who'd been both divorced and widowed: she said the primary difference is that, in a divorce, they pack their own stuff. I'd add that, in a divorce, generally there's only two parties arguing over belongings. (My late husband's ex asked for "her" wedding china -- which she'd given up in the divorce -- back. I recognize that she had grief too, but...no.)

* Sometimes the nicest thing you can do for someone is make sure they eat and have someone to be there with, even if they don't say a word.

* Movies can be low stress shared experience because no one feels obligated to talk.

* There's no easy way to crawl up out of grief except one moment at a time. Decide to live for one moment. Try to do something that pleases you for one hour. Thank living through the day. Eventually, it gets better.

* In my case, it permanently changed me. There is no old normal again. There is only a new normal.

* If you are the person who lost a loved one, especially a spouse or life partner, recognize that this is the one time when you might be able to be forgiven for unusual acting out. If you see that from the other end, try to let it slide unless it's actually dangerous.

* Know the symptoms of depression so that you will be able to recognize them. I was going into my doc for something else and read an article about signs. I had none of the primary symptoms and quite a few secondary ones. I started on anti-depressants. In two weeks, I went from being convinced I'd never write another word to writing again. It wasn't great writing, but I was able to have a creative outlet again, which in turn made me even happier.

* A few days before his sudden death, Richard asked me to promise to remarry and be happy if something happened to him. This promise kept me strong in times when I was in a lot of pain, and I think it was a great gift to me at that time.

I'll add a few things.

I don't know if it was a great idea for a mod on an online support group for young widows to have seen me posting a few days after Cliff passed and decided "HAY YOU'RE GREAT YO HERE - YOU MOD NOW BYE BYE" and skedaddled. You know me. Okay. Sure. Thanks for the compliment!

Uh oh.

One of the first things I had to do was shut down group membership sign ups to query-first only - because we were getting spammed with credit card applications and dating trolls. (Hey, we'd all gotten life insurance payouts and HAD to be LONELY. *eyeroll* Slammed that down, yes I did. LOUDLY.)

It's gone very quiet there, and I think I may leave the group myself soon. It's been ten years.

But I got to talk to people who had lost their spouse in car crashes as well as long-term care facilities. There's a key difference: in a sudden death, you have the prep and as well as the cope all at once. It's overwhelming. The aftermath can be something straight out of your worst nightmares, and you face it alone. No warning. Harsh? Oh man. The shock alone will ruin you.

If you have warning (you get a cancer diagnosis, you're dealing with a chronic issue that won't ever get better, or you just wore it out - whatever it was), it changes the landscape a bit.

You can ask. You can get advice. You can get direction.

You can wrap your head around it and start pretending for what will be. Play-act in your head. Try it on.

That's not to say it's easier. Gentler, perhaps. Kinder is relative.

In a lot of ways, it's kind of like someone installing a port into a vein - and moving it on a daily basis to another location TBD. The person dying is doing all the screaming, though. All you feel is the life bleeding out of you. They don't tell you where it will come from. Or where it all goes. It's just gone.

When it ends, all you can do is exhale - grateful that it is over. It gets no worse from here.

Not for them, anyway. And that's been all you've thought about for months. How can you keep it from getting worse...and then, that worry is taken from you.

And the other very wetware effects kick in. If you know what to expect, you warn people.

Don't expect - and don't try - to do more than breathe for 90 days. No, seriously. Don't try to figure out who gets this or that, don't sell the house, give away the pets or sign anything regarding contracts. You will have enough settling the remains - and society has put plenty of very easy-to-follow guidelines with people who know their stuff to help do that. Let them. Have the memorial services. Have the wake, the funeral, the setting free - surround yourself with ritual. They exist for a reason. This is HUGE. They give you time.

Nothing...NOTHING...has to be done right now. I don't care what it is. No, really. Don't do anything. The urge will be there. Fight it down.

Get a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil and carry them with you everywhere you go. Write everything down. Because for the next 45 days, your short-term memory is taking a vacation. You will not retain a damn thing, and there is nothing to do about it - so don't freak out when you notice it happening. This is normal. It will go away.

After the first 90 days are up, the next 45 or so are going to be a lot like a turtle coming out of its shell. You kind of peer out, very slowly, taking stock of what's around you and then you might begin to think about what you're going to do from here. Think about, mind. There is still nothing more with the doing. No, I'm serious. Leave the doing. Pay the bills, keep the plates spinning...but leave the rest for later. There is no hurry now. None whatsoever.

*chuckles* Cliff has been "that little shit" for almost all of the ten years he's been gone.

I didn't do the movie thing, and still don't. When Cliff passed, 'What Dreams May Come' had just come out and Robin Williams movie or not, couldn't see it. Didn't want it. For me, long drives with music and then video games worked better. I brought home a serious amount of stuff from Dave & Busters. Ate a lot of Curry House. Worked a lot of overtime.

They'll tell you the average length of time before you're in another serious relationship - even married - is three years. At the time Cliff passed in 1998, I looked around and went 's'yeah, right' - and then I met Jim in 1999, over a year later. Married in 2001. Um.

I still miss him. I miss the most that nobody around me now knows Cliff - the person I married - at all. (There are a few - very few - people who knew him in his last years. Not the same thing.) I take him with me everywhere I go, every day. I am brave in so many ways because of him. But nobody knows it, or why.

My process is not your process or her process or his process. Grief is a very individual thing, can't be weighed or measured or predicted. The most lasting effect for me is anger. I hated how he had to be told 'this is it' and 'it' was effectively jail in the ground floor of a condo in Ontario with no access to the outside world besides AOL. On dial-up. That's for starters. No trips to wonderful places, no outings into the bright sunshine, no long talks and heartfelt moments. I had to work - and twelve hour days, mind - and people would just shrug and say it would somehow work out. Well, of course it did. It ended!

I tend to get very mulish when I'm forced into anything similar. And I still don't cry much anymore. If I had ever started, I would never have had a reason to stop. And if there was anything I knew well, it was that nobody was coming. If I cried, I would cry alone until I stopped myself. Cliff's caregivers went on with their careers, and damn if I didn't miss them too!

The loss is just the start. You get tripped up by the damndest things. And they take months to show themselves.

I'll go over and drop a note. Hell, I moderated a support group for all those years.

I just wish it wasn't necessary. This just sucks. And I am so, so sorry.

Dear Cliff.

Thank you for being a grown man when you got sick and allowed me to get some experience dealing with altered states when people get sick.

It's coming in very handy right now.

...

Got home last night to a truly at-the-wall Jim, and a velcro kid. Would not give him a moment's peace. Would not go down for a nap. Hypervigilant.

Got home, fed, bathed, booked and put to bed. Asleep nearly at once before 6:00 PM.

By 8, he was running a 104.7 temp. Back up, give meds and put down again - but could not go far.

Suffice it to say, not many of us got much sleep and I'll be going home at lunch to help with that and put both boys down for naps.

Watching temps all the while. I think kid was probably running hot all day, and Jim was too frustrated to figure it out.

That's to the bad. To the good? Kid has no problem announcing to me "I'm sick!" I'll take it.

As of 1:30 this morning, Cliff has been gone for eleven years.

I can tell you where I was when I got the news, what I was doing and what I was wearing. I can see my nephew waking up in the middle of the night to come tell me (and his mother) he had a sore throat, but didn't know why. (Yes, I was at Sis's house. I had to work the next day OR ELSE but Cliff's status had been poor when I saw him at the hospital that afternoon. He was septic as HELL - but the resident had released me when I asked if I needed to stay. Cliff had been worse, and lived - nobody said anything to me about that being 'It.' Turned out, it was.)

Nephew is a bit more like me. He might not always know why, but he certainly knows when something has come through the building.

My immediate reaction was relief and shock. Relief that it was finally over (it had been AWFUL far too long, with no hope of anything good ever again...too long. Waaaay too long - )and shock that oh my it really COULD happen, and it had.

Sometime in the next day afterward, I 'listened' for him - and was rewarded with a presence like searing cold champagne - bubbly, FAST moving, effervescent and jubilant. He had told me to celebrate his freedom upon his death - and oh, he was. He so very was.

I visit his grave on this day (and I'll go out later) if I at all can (and check on it when I'm in the neighborhood the rest of the year) and try to get a feel for how things are going with him. Lately, it's been very clear he's Not There. I've gotten a sense of the answering machine has been left on in the past - now, it's almost as if he's moved and not left a forwarding address.

But if I stick around a bit, tidying up the joint - I get a brief impression of irritation - 'what ARE you doing here?' He's busy doing other things. He's very clear that I really need to be doing other things as well, too.

Well, I am. This year more than any other. *thinks* He'd like Xander a whole lot - they share a wicked sense of humor, that's for sure.

Oh, I miss him. I miss him the most when I'm around people who won't know anything about him except what I tell them - and it will always be filtered around 'this is Donna's late husband' first and foremost.

People, he was so smart. (I say that about Xander, but here's why I wondered. Cliff WAS smart - and he'll be my touchstone going forward on the matter.) Cliff was bright enough to break brand-new plumbing by first finding the three-penny nails, and then dropping them from a high enough height to break the terracotta pipes (don't ask me why Dad used them, I don't know) - because he wanted to know if he could. About five years old or so.

By ten, he had devised a means to put an entire garden on the roof of the house using a pulley system cobbled together out of rope, buckets and the gears from his bicycle. Nobody even knew it was there until the earthworms started falling through the ceiling upstairs.

Dad was a thermionics guy at JPL - so at times, brought interesting things home. Like, the first samples of solar cells. They snapped so nice when broken in half. Yes, he did. He might have been younger than Xander at the time.

(He would have thought Phinneas & Ferb were pikers.)

He went to school in private schools because public schools wouldn't take a kid with diabetes. He had a healthy love/hate relationship with most organized religions as a result - and kept his Bible on the shelf right next to the book on Tarot (I still have that one) and the Joy of Sex (which he found dull). He also took the course on Human Sexuality in college and kept the textbooks, but warned people they were pretty pedestrian. I think I still have it as well - he wrote 'I AM NOT SANE' on the ribs of the pages. That's how you know which one was his.

He did three and four digit division and square roots in his head to keep from being bored. He would cover pages and pages of paper with Math just for fun.

So when a chance to work at JPL on a student project came along, he took it - and that's how he was programming for Voyager in FORTRAN at the age of 14.

By the time I met him in his early twenties, he had not only taken Basic Mountaineering with the Sierra Club, he had been teaching classes in it. He had bought a house. He had never worked for minimum wage - always knowing he was worth more, and asking for it. (When minimum was $2.90, he was working as a student engineer in Anaheim for $8.00, for example.)

Those happy days when the shuttle program was new and all that.

By the time he was thirty, complications had set in - he couldn't see well enough to climb. Soon, he would have strokes, heart attacks and then amputations, dialysis and disability that would leave him housebound inside of 600 sft. I said awful, right?

He wouldn't live long enough to see Y2K. The wii. Machines that had multi gig processor speeds, broadband internet in the home - none of that.

He also would never see any benefit or settlement on his workmans comp claims - they would never even consider it until he was dead and had said so to me with him sitting right next to me.

I miss him.

And I am glad he doesn't have to deal with any of that crap ever again.

So, husband of mine - I celebrate your freedom this day.

Give Freddie my regards, kick Michael Jackson's ass for me and tell Patrick Swayze everything is going to be okay.

I'll see you later.

As of 1:30 this morning, Cliff has been gone for eleven years.

I can tell you where I was when I got the news, what I was doing and what I was wearing. I can see my nephew waking up in the middle of the night to come tell me (and his mother) he had a sore throat, but didn't know why. (Yes, I was at Sis's house. I had to work the next day OR ELSE but Cliff's status had been poor when I saw him at the hospital that afternoon. He was septic as HELL - but the resident had released me when I asked if I needed to stay. Cliff had been worse, and lived - nobody said anything to me about that being 'It.' Turned out, it was.)

Nephew is a bit more like me. He might not always know why, but he certainly knows when something has come through the building.

My immediate reaction was relief and shock. Relief that it was finally over (it had been AWFUL far too long, with no hope of anything good ever again...too long. Waaaay too long - )and shock that oh my it really COULD happen, and it had.

Sometime in the next day afterward, I 'listened' for him - and was rewarded with a presence like searing cold champagne - bubbly, FAST moving, effervescent and jubilant. He had told me to celebrate his freedom upon his death - and oh, he was. He so very was.

I visit his grave on this day (and I'll go out later) if I at all can (and check on it when I'm in the neighborhood the rest of the year) and try to get a feel for how things are going with him. Lately, it's been very clear he's Not There. I've gotten a sense of the answering machine has been left on in the past - now, it's almost as if he's moved and not left a forwarding address.

But if I stick around a bit, tidying up the joint - I get a brief impression of irritation - 'what ARE you doing here?' He's busy doing other things. He's very clear that I really need to be doing other things as well, too.

Well, I am. This year more than any other. *thinks* He'd like Xander a whole lot - they share a wicked sense of humor, that's for sure.

Oh, I miss him. I miss him the most when I'm around people who won't know anything about him except what I tell them - and it will always be filtered around 'this is Donna's late husband' first and foremost.

People, he was so smart. (I say that about Xander, but here's why I wondered. Cliff WAS smart - and he'll be my touchstone going forward on the matter.) Cliff was bright enough to break brand-new plumbing by first finding the three-penny nails, and then dropping them from a high enough height to break the terracotta pipes (don't ask me why Dad used them, I don't know) - because he wanted to know if he could. About five years old or so.

By ten, he had devised a means to put an entire garden on the roof of the house using a pulley system cobbled together out of rope, buckets and the gears from his bicycle. Nobody even knew it was there until the earthworms started falling through the ceiling upstairs.

Dad was a thermionics guy at JPL - so at times, brought interesting things home. Like, the first samples of solar cells. They snapped so nice when broken in half. Yes, he did. He might have been younger than Xander at the time.

(He would have thought Phinneas & Ferb were pikers.)

He went to school in private schools because public schools wouldn't take a kid with diabetes. He had a healthy love/hate relationship with most organized religions as a result - and kept his Bible on the shelf right next to the book on Tarot (I still have that one) and the Joy of Sex (which he found dull). He also took the course on Human Sexuality in college and kept the textbooks, but warned people they were pretty pedestrian. I think I still have it as well - he wrote 'I AM NOT SANE' on the ribs of the pages. That's how you know which one was his.

He did three and four digit division and square roots in his head to keep from being bored. He would cover pages and pages of paper with Math just for fun.

So when a chance to work at JPL on a student project came along, he took it - and that's how he was programming for Voyager in FORTRAN at the age of 14.

By the time I met him in his early twenties, he had not only taken Basic Mountaineering with the Sierra Club, he had been teaching classes in it. He had bought a house. He had never worked for minimum wage - always knowing he was worth more, and asking for it. (When minimum was $2.90, he was working as a student engineer in Anaheim for $8.00, for example.)

Those happy days when the shuttle program was new and all that.

By the time he was thirty, complications had set in - he couldn't see well enough to climb. Soon, he would have strokes, heart attacks and then amputations, dialysis and disability that would leave him housebound inside of 600 sft. I said awful, right?

He wouldn't live long enough to see Y2K. The wii. Machines that had multi gig processor speeds, broadband internet in the home - none of that.

He also would never see any benefit or settlement on his workmans comp claims - they would never even consider it until he was dead and had said so to me with him sitting right next to me.

I miss him.

And I am glad he doesn't have to deal with any of that crap ever again.

So, husband of mine - I celebrate your freedom this day.

Give Freddie my regards, kick Michael Jackson's ass for me and tell Patrick Swayze everything is going to be okay.

I'll see you later.