Uncategorized

ConFusion was a strange experience this year, in some ways. I didn’t bring my camera. I only did one panel, along with a reading and the group autographing. I didn’t even wear the fancy author jacket. I just showed up in my T-shirt and jeans and mostly just hung out.

This was also the first time I’d brought my son along. It was fun getting to spend the weekend with him. I know he got a bit bored when I’d get caught up talking to all of my grown-up friends, but I think he had a good time. He attended a few panels on his own, went swimming, did some art stuff, played Pokemon Go with me and Suzanne Church … and at the end, he said he wanted to come back again next year.

One of the best parts for me — really, the primary reason I wanted to go — was seeing people again. This was my first convention in more than a year.

One of the most frustrating parts — as it always is — was not having enough time with everyone.

Lots of people asked how I was doing, or expressed condolences, or said they didn’t know what to say, or gave me a hug… and it all helped. It all made me feel cared about and less alone with everything I’ve been through in the past year and a half. Thank you all for that.

And then I came back home and spent an hour shoveling snow and ice so I could get my car into the garage.

#

Back home, and back to the routine. It’s almost five months now since Amy died. Fourteen months since she started getting sick. The sadness and the loneliness and the emptiness are all still very much there, but I’ve been feeling more functional. I’m continuing to do what I can to take care of myself and the kids. And to paraphrase my therapist, there’s a bit of confidence that I can do this. I don’t like it, and it’s a hell of a lot harder, but I’m managing.

I was even able to break through the last part of the outline on Terminal Peace and get back to writing the ending this week.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading about grief and being a widower and single parent, trying to be proactive about self-care and caring for the kids. Some of the changes I’ve made in the past months…

• Exercise – I’ve been doing this pretty much since Amy got sick. I think it’s a coping mechanism. But as long as I don’t get obsessive about it, it’s a healthy one. (Side note: No less than three people last week commented that I looked (or felt) like I’d been working out. That was unexpected, but nice.)
• Game night – I’ve got a group of gaming friends, and we never manage to get together to do stuff. Well, I herded those cats into a monthly get-together, because I need more social interaction and escape. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep that going.
• Therapy – I started back with my therapist, and have also been attending a weekly support group for parents who’ve lost a partner. It helps me to stay in touch with the grief and keep working through it, and to make sure I’m continuing to take active steps to manage everything the best I can.
• Asking for Help – I recruited my father to take my son to one of his weekly things. It’s only one night a week, but it frees up a couple hours of my time, and it’s a little less stress on my shoulders. (I need to keep working on this one…)
• Saying Yes to Social Stuff – As much as I can, if someone invites me to lunch or a movie or whatever, I’m trying to say yes. Even if I’m not always feeling super-social. It helps me to get out and stay connected with other people. (I need to get more proactive about initiating this stuff.)
• Letting Myself Grieve – Sometimes the grief just hits. It happened at work a couple weeks back, triggered by a conversation about hospitals. It happened Saturday afternoon at the con, and I have no idea what cause it that time. Rather than trying to keep the pain locked away, I try to let it just happen. Let myself be sad. Let myself miss her. Let myself cry, if it happens. It hurts, but there’s a sense of release to it, and I’m more functional afterward.

So to answer the most frequently asked question of the weekend, I’m doing okay. Not great — it’s probably going to take a while to reach great — but okay. It hurts, but I feel like I’m getting closer to acceptance of what my life looks like now.

I think Amy would be proud of how her husband and kids are holding up and working through things.

Went back to Eclectic Art on Friday to get the next round of work done on the tattoo. James had done the linework and initial shading at the beginning of December. This time, he started adding color.

It’s hard to say if this hurt more than before. Some of the thicker lines in December felt like pretty deep scratches. None of the coloring was that sharp, but he had to go over the same patch of skin again and again to get it all filled in, which wasn’t pleasant. And as I understand it, the needles are different for color and shading — more like a broad (but still very small) paintbrush made of needles, as opposed to the pen-tip style needle(s) for the lines.

None of it was too bad. But it was enough I couldn’t just doze off and take a nap 🙂

He set up a much more colorful palette this time, focusing on the colors for the grass and the dragon.

I paid a bit more attention to the tattoo gun this time. I’m fascinated by how it looks like a steampunked fountain pen. There are no ink cartridges or anything. He just dips into the color(s) he wants, mixing and blending as needed.

He started in on the dragon. At first, I couldn’t really see where he was going with some of his color choices. And it’s hard to watch someone painting your arm. So mostly I just laid there and played games on the phone.

Unfortunately, we had to cut things a little short. He had some family stuff come up, which I can understand. We’re going to try to do a longer session at the end of the month, but it’s possible we might need to do a fourth to finish everything.

Here’s what my arm looked like at the end of three hours of coloring. (This is the pic I shared on Twitter and Facebook.)

I’m really happy with how it looks so far, but there’s a lot left to go. The tree will be getting watercolor-style foliage, and then there’s the moon and the night sky, along with finishing the dragon’s wings and the book and other little details.

But I love the colors and the lighting effects and the way the grass turned out and the shading… All of which makes me impatient to go back and get the rest done!

Aftercare is pretty much the same as before. There’s more oozing and seepage this time. Things look a bit gross underneath the bandage (a clear, breathable “tape” that covers the new tattoo, which is essentially an open wound). I debated sharing a picture, but nobody needs to see that. Let’s just say the grass looks more like mud now.

The one downside, aside from my impatience about wanting to finish, is that I need to avoid some of my exercise routine for a bit until it heals more. I may skip karate tomorrow night, too. Knowing my luck, somebody would decide it was the perfect night to punch me right in the arm…

As some of you know, my kids and I skipped town and went to northern California for a week over the Christmas holiday. In part, it was because we’d never been. Mostly, it was because we weren’t up for being here and trying to have a “normal” Christmas.

Aside from our almost-yearly trips to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, this was the first real vacation we’d taken in … well, pretty much as long as I can remember. We’ve had a few weekend trips here and there, but not many, and not in years.

Looking back, I think I tried to squeeze in too many destinations. Next time, I’ll plan on slowing down and spending a little more time. But overall, I’m calling it a success. We all had some good experiences and some “wow” moments. My daughter got to see sea lions. My son got to pet lots of new dogs. I got to visit the Charles M. Schulz museum 🙂

For anyone who hasn’t seen the pics on Facebook, I’ve posted the California album over on Flickr as well.

We drove from the airport to Santa Cruz to Santa Rosa to Yosemite to Folsom to a different airport. There were whales and elephant seals and mountains and redwoods. We spent about half the time with some close family friends — family in all but blood, essentially.

I had plenty of moments of sadness, thinking about how much Amy would have loved this, and how I wished we’d done it when she was alive and healthy. But I also know she’d have been happy to see me and the kids getting some enjoyment and wonder. Especially the kids.

That was the best part for me, too. Seeing genuine joy and wonder and happiness from the kids — especially my daughter. I know they were hurting sometimes too, having some of the same grief and pain and regret I was, but I think the majority of our time was positive and good for us all.

And now it’s 2020. My son starts school on Monday. My daughter and I have both started back to work again. I opened up Terminal Peace and did a few hundred words tonight before a blood sugar crash ended that. (I’m fine. But dang, this disease is annoying.) Most of the time, the New Year seems pretty arbitrary and meaningless, but this year, I do have more of a sense of … not renewal or a new beginning, exactly, but a sense of starting to let go of a little of the pain and trauma of 2019.

Who knows if that will continue. Grief doesn’t just stop. I’ll never stop missing her or wishing she was still with us. But there’s hope that this year will be better — at least for our family. (I’m not gonna weigh in on events in the larger world quite yet. Son of a crap…)

For those who celebrate, I hope the holidays were good to you. And for all of us, I hope 2020 is a much better year.

Yesterday I had the first of three sessions for my very first tattoo.

I’d been talking about this for much of 2019. If I was going to do it, I wanted to go all out. I knew I wanted something that would represent my family, so I talked to Amy and the kids about what sort of imagery would best represent them.

Amy liked the idea of a tree: natural and outdoorsy, with strong roots and branches. For my son Jamie, a dragon was the obvious choice. And for Skylar, we went with a moon. I spent a while looking at artists online, scrolling through portfolios, before finally settling on James Hurley at Eclectic Art Tattoo in Lansing.

I went in to meet with him in August. We talked about what I wanted, and he sounded confident he could pull it all together and create something I was happy with.

Here’s the “Before” picture from yesterday morning — my last day ever of having a naked left arm. (Click on any of the pics if you want a larger view.)

James was finishing up inking the drawing to create a stencil when I arrived. This was my first time seeing his design, which made me nervous. What if I didn’t like it? What if I wanted him to make lots of changes?

I needn’t have worried. I peeked over his shoulder, saw what he was touching up, and loved it. It got the three elements I wanted, and the overall image is very on-brand for me 🙂

He finished up, then photocopied the whole thing to check the sizing against my arm. He wasn’t sure if this would be too big, or if we should go a tiny bit smaller, but in the end we both decided to keep it as is. So the photocopy went through another machine to print the stencil. It reminded me some of the old dittos we used to get back in elementary school…

Now it was time to prep my arm. I’d shaved beforehand, but he ran the razor over my arm to catch any strays and get rid of my arm stubble. He cleaned the skin and applied the stencil. He also sketched a bit with Sharpie, kind of marking where the foliage would eventually go for the tree, and giving a sense of the boundaries for the image.

For the first time, I got to see what this thing would look like on my arm.

Spoiler: I liked it. Purple ditto lines and all.

Now there was nothing left but to get on the table and let James start firing a motorized needle into my skin.

He started with some of the smallest lines — the tufts of grass around the dragon’s feet — to give me a chance to get used to the pain. This was my first tattoo, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but my daughter had described it as feeling like a kitten’s claw scratching a sunburn.

That was pretty accurate. And as someone who’s gotten plenty of kitten scratches over the years, the pain wasn’t bad.

He’d ink a few lines, wipe away the excess ink, and repeat, pausing as needed to dip more ink. Like a motorized fountain pen. (There was also a brief delay for equipment troubleshooting, since the he was using had a short.)

Here’s what his workspace looked like after we’d been going for a while…

All total, he spent close to four hours working on my arm, stopping for a few breaks for both of us. Two or three times, he’d spray me down in Bactine and wrap the arm in Bactine-soaked paper towels, which was heavenly. A few minutes of that took all the pain away.

Because by now, he was doing some of the longer and thicker lines. Some of those lines went into the more sensitive skin close to the armpit. Basically, it felt the same as before, but the sunburn was worse and the kittens had longer claws. There was a little swelling with the lines, and a few tiny spots of blood, but nothing bad or worrisome.

We had a little time left when he finished inking the last of the lines, so he started on some shading, talking about how excited he was at the lighting possibilities in the image, and all of the depth and development yet to come. You could tell he was into this, and genuinely liked the artwork he was creating, which is a good thing.

He also drew in some light gray lines that will serve more as guidance for the next round, but after that, he’d done pretty much everything he could do for now. He talked about wanting to start on the color just so we could see what it looked like, but that would have to wait. He wiped me up and gave me one last, lovely Bactine wrap.

We went over care instructions. I’d get a breathable covering that stays on for three days. After that, wash 3 times/day and apply a thin layer of ointment until it’s healed, which could be a week or more. (With me being diabetic, I’m guessing it will be more.)

I’ve got three sessions scheduled. Number two will be in the beginning of January. We’ll start coloring things in then. I’m not sure how much we’ll get done in that session, and what will have to wait until the end of January. This is a good-sized tattoo, and that’s a lot of skin to color.

Here’s what I looked like at the end of it all.

It’s a bit sore —  again, a lot like a sunburn. I couldn’t sleep on that arm last night, but I haven’t been sleeping well in months anyway, so it’s not like it caused me any additional trouble.

I’m really happy with how it looks so far. I feel like James really got what I wanted, even though I couldn’t really visualize it in my own head.

I’ve been looking forward to this for many months. Now, I just can’t wait to go back and get it finished!

Oh, and people have warned me that this is addictive. For now, I think I’m happy just getting this one completed. But I won’t rule out the possibility of another one of these days, if there’s something significant and meaningful I want to add. (And once I’ve replenished the tattoo budget!)

I’ll post more pics in January after we finish the next session.