Unfinished

So much to do. Daily tasks. Bucket list, too. Good intentions figure, too. Business done. Business unfinished.

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now. As the first anniversary of Rocky’s death approaches, I become more and more aware of the things we hoped to do but didn’t. The road trips dreamed about, some even planned. Illness does that; it interrupts bucket lists.

I thought of other unfinished business. I guess it rekindles at bedtime. An empty bed. No accompanying wheezes or snorts. No rustling about on the mattress. Just silence. Stillness. Something not done. Just nothing.

Mealtimes, too. Breakfasts are very quiet these days. No hustle and bustle. The oatmeal is missed. I haven’t brought myself to learning how to do that simple task yet. A year without hot oatmeal! Now a bygone staple.

Movies to watch on TV is a finished task. We avoided each other’s go to titles; our tastes were that far apart. No sci fi for me; his favorite! No romance movies; my favorite. And documentaries, maybe that is my favorite, too. Not Rocky. He didn’t like reality in the face of the daily reality.

Trips not taken. He loved road trips. I headed the car to places he had not seen in his lifetime. From those trips came his love affair with the southwestern themes for his art in clay. The crumbled adobe structures became a fast favorite for him.

Rocky and I never ventured to New England. That was on our bucket list. Mine especially. Rocky had a memorable trip to Boston one time and spoke of it often. He had not been to the rest of quaint New England. I wanted to share that with him. Never did.

We did explore parts of the south and fell in love with Asheville, North Carolina. Also, Savannah, and Charleston, too.

We explored parts of Chicago together as well but that dwindled with his health. Some days we would drive through areas of the city with no plans on stopping, parking and walking about. Too much effort. We drove through his old childhood neighborhoods a few times. I knew he was imagining his mom at the kitchen windows. He became very quiet at times. Memories are like that, absorbing.

Unfinished business. A partial retirement but one marked by ill health and disability. Understandable. Unpleasant. Fears, even. And then, there it was. In all its hideous truth – pain, fuzzy thinking, sleeping the day away, few thoughts shared, especially with the laryngectomy. And more pain. Until it was no more.

One year of this. Aloneness. Perhaps that is the most unfinished of all.

July 19, 2024  

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