Yesterday was Sharon's birthday

 

And once again, I didn't do anything special for her. It's like I can't get that day right, even though I really wanted to this time. I was gonna make some kind of ritual out of eating a pizza in her honor. Light a candle. Drink a beer. Make myself cry over the fact that I missed her. But I was distracted all day with the problems of a new computer that arrived broken. And with guinea hens. And my regular routines.

I did see one shooting star in the early morning hours, when I dragged myself out of bed to see the Perseids. It was her thing. The Perseid meteor shower comes around every year as her birthday approaches. It usually peaks a night or two before. 

She told me that when she was gone that she'd visit me every year as a meteor shooting across the sky. If I look up, I'll see her flipping me off. Or blowing me a kiss, I forget which. 

Both years since she passed, I've seen at least one shooting star of extraordinary length and brilliance streaking across the sky in the early morning hours of Sharon's birthday.

I did dream of her, but only briefly and I'm trying to remember it. She was still in bed, ill, and I was told that I needed to make a list of "what was wrong with Sharon" by some health care professional or psychiatric person. I came up with a very simple list with three categories: MS problems, incontinence issues and spiritual issues. 

Of the three, my conclusion was that only the first two were really problems, while the third one she had licked. She was doing better spiritually than I was (or anybody I knew, for that matter). I was trying to word it properly, but she let me know I was on the right track. 

"And don't you forget it," was her unspoken agreement with my assessment.

That's all I can recall of it. Today is another shrink appointment. Last week's appointment was not really very satisfying. We didn't speak of anything that moved me to tears, we were focusing on some minutia of my routine and getting all hung up on semantics. 

I was disappointed because the week before I had broken down again when we were discussing Sharon and my guilt over my lousy caregiving. It started with a personal assessment of one word descriptions of myself. "I am, I think I am or I'm not," I was to respond as she fired off adjectives that would define my character as I saw it. We got to the stuff about being "nice," and I just lost it.

Being "nice" was Sharon's spiritual advice to me in a nutshell. All of her caregiving instructions could be encapsulated in the phrase "BE NICE," which she even had me print out in a giant font and pin to my reminder board in the bedroom. It's still there, though I don't stay in that room long enough to notice it much.

If I was to believe in reincarnation, I would say that I must have been a Nazi in my previous life, and that taking care of Sharon was my punishment and karmic lesson in this one. The fact that it came so unnaturally to me, that I resisted it with every ounce of my being and felt an angry urge to rebel, when the normal response was empathy, is consistent with the theory. 

I don't know what I believe, but I know it seems like I was fighting something in my deepest nature, whose origin I couldn't trace to any experience I had in this life. 

Plus, there was that fascination I had with the Nazi side of WWII when I was a child. I was fascinated by the whole dark imagery and mystique of a culture so un-apologetically evil as I pored through history books with pictures of atrocities. Not your "nice kid" by any means, though I never blossomed into any kind of white supremacist.

Anyway, Whiskey and the Keets are calling me to get off the couch and get started with my daily routine. Thor, my new mega computer is up and running, though I'll have to duct tape his cover to the case. He is so large that I'll have to get out the jigsaw and carve a larger opening in the back of the desk to run the wires through. It's twice the size of an average desktop, standing 24" from top to bottom. I can't stand to look at it taking up all the real estate in the middle of my floor much longer, so I'll definitely be stuffing him into that cubby hole one way or the other.