I've had a wonderful day ... really wonderful. I met Stoney at the movie theater and we watched Rush ... then we drove over to Baker's Square and had lunch and a piece of pie. He smelled wonderful ... then again he always smells wonderful ... and he's fun to talk with and the cherry pie was delicious. The whole afternoon was just a big ol' bucket of win.
I ran by the grocery store to pick up a few things for tomorrow ... and came home to relax for awhile before I started cooking. Then the oddest thing happened ... I started having a conversation with J about his wife, my best friend who died.
He's been acting like a complete ass ever since her death. Two weeks after she died, he had his first date ... and he's been so determined to find anyone that he created profiles on two dating websites. He stopped being able to talk about anything other than himself ... or whatever girl he happened to be dating. He basically stopped being fun to be around ... not because he was grieving ... but because he was so self-centered. But tonight ... tonight I thought I might be making progress. I got him talking about her.
It started with one of his typical texts. As usual, he was bloviating.
but I feel like my life has started over. :)
It's not that I don't want him to be happy. But the constant insensitivity to everyone else has worn me down. I was driving back from Baker's Square and I had a flash ... another one of those moments where I thought, "I wish I could call and tell her ..." and it made me sad. But there he was, gloating over his new house and his new car ... all bought with the life insurance provided by my friend's death.
I wrote him back ... saying that I still missed her every day ... and I thought three months wasn't an unreasonable amount of time to grieve for someone who died so suddenly.
I asked if he'd called the monument company yet because the stone still wasn't placed. He gave me an extraordinarily long excuse why he hadn't. He was just so busy last week ... work was really taking it out of him and he was SO busy!
Now this ... this irritated me. He wasn't too busy to take his new girl out for an early birthday dinner. Not too busy to take this same girl to lunch ... or to order her flowers. No, he had plenty of time for that ... but making a five minute call to the monument company was just too much.
I wrote him and said, "I've decided that the only way I can cope with losing her ... is that God knew how bad it was going to get for her. He didn't want her to be bed bound or not be able to feed herself ... and he took her before it could get that bad. He knew I'd miss her ... but that I was strong enough to handle missing her if it meant she didn't have to suffer."
He wrote me this long message back. It basically said he blamed himself for not taking her to the ER sooner. That he should've seen how bad she'd gotten. That he should've known because it had been getting bad for awhile. He told me how she'd started getting worse ... how he'd had to feed her a few times and she was about to apply for disability. He told me he would sometimes go to her online obituary and read all the comments people left. And for a moment, I paused ...
Maybe he did miss her. Maybe he was acting this way because it was the only way he could cope with losing her? Maybe he was genuinely grieving?
Then he started talking about his new girlfriend using Snapchat on her trip to NYC ... and how he hadn't gotten a boob shot yet.
Sigh. Nope. Sometimes a banana is just a banana. And sometimes a douche is just a douche.
Everybody wants to have a home
Don't make no difference what nobody says
Ain't nobody like to be alone
Bruce Springsteen -
Everybody's Got a Hungry Heart
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