Who's Going To Handle The Thermostat?

I published another collection of short stories today. It feels like betrayal doing anything like that. You know, things that are just for me. It's not even been two weeks yet, and this feels dangerously close to "getting back to normal."

But the book was actually finished back in December. I've just been waiting for a couple of beta readers to get back to me. So all I really had to do was fix a few typos, give it a final read-through, and upload the damn thing. It still feels wrong somehow.

My house is a little cold today, or so I'm told. I told mom she could have free reign over the thermostat. It sounds like I'm being a hospitable host, but the truth is I don't actually want the responsibility. I've never been the thermostat master. I don't tend to care about the perfect temperature. I put on a blanket if I'm too cold, and I strip to my boxers if I'm too hot. But my "comfortable range" has always been a lot wider than KJ's.

Once mom leaves in a few weeks, I just don't know how I'm going to manage the thermostat. It's weird the little things that hit you. Yes I'll miss KJ's smile and her personality, but I'll also miss her micromanagement. I'm the type of person who will shiver for hours without noticing I'm cold. Seriously, I just wasn't designed to live by myself.

I have to see a lawyer on Friday. There's probate things I'm supposed to work out. KJ had no assets, no will, no trust, nothing like that. Her family doesn't want anything of hers, and she didn't own anything expensive. But apparently the law here still requires some sort of probate/estate paperwork.

Her bank refuses to close her account until they get that paperwork. I sent them her death certificate, but they said without probate paperwork they'll keep it open, accruing monthly fees. I don't need to claim the money in her account - she only had about $20 in there - but I'm going to end up spending hundreds in legal fees to get it closed, probably.

Hey you, reading this. Leave a will. Even if you're poor, leave a will. It will simplify things for those you leave behind.

I'm not hurting for money yet, so don't worry about me there. Still, if anybody just wants to help me out financially, the usual methods still stand. You can tip me here:

https://buymeacoffee.com/xine

Or you can always buy my books:

https://books2read.com/ap/8N19Lr/Xine-Fury

https://xine-fury.itch.io/ 

The books2read link will take you to a landing page for all my books, which will then link you to Amazon, Kobo, and other e-book retailers. The final link is for itch.io, which is a great site for indy creators (mostly computer games). That site will actually let you download my books as files without the DRM, so you can manually transfer them to whatever device you wish to use.

I don't get much from my book sales, but if you read any of the books and review them, it will help drive more sales in the future.

God, I hate to sound like a shill in a mourning blog, but some of you have been asking if there's anything you can do. If you want to make me feel a little better, book sales are a great start.

I'm really sick of all this.

Hollow Pursuits

Mom and I were sorting boxes today when I came across my wedding album. I was having a good day, but after that I had to sit down and rest a while. I just suddenly lost all my energy.

I'm glad I'm getting things done but I have no idea how to have fun anymore. Sometimes that helps me get things done. I figure if I can't think of anything I'm in the mood for, then I might as well do something I'm never in the mood for. But that policy only takes me so far. Sometimes I feel a wave of grief and suddenly all my energy's gone, like my batteries just suddenly fell out of the compartment.

It's going to take me a while to have fun again. When video games started having achievements and trophies, I really got into achievement hunting. But the hunting also sort of ruined video games for me. Now if I've already gotten all a game's achievements, I'm less likely to go back and play it again.

Tangent: You know, the above could probably be fixed. I think it would be cool if achievements also had a number beside them, indicating how many times you've popped that achievement. Then you'd have more reason to go back and do it all again. But I digress.

It's also harder for me to go back and play older games, the ones from the pre-achievement days. Playing them just feels like wasting my time. I mean, arguably video games are always a waste of time, but counter-arguably you're never wasting time if you're having fun. People need fun now and then, psychologically speaking.

Anyway, I've spent 30+ years training myself to have fun in relation to another human being. Having fun by myself feels like wasting time, in a way it didn't seem so before. Every time I laugh at a comedian on the TV, I look over to make sure KJ is having fun too. Which is why I'm glad my mom's here, but she won't be here forever. I have to learn how to have fun by myself again.

I touched on this in a previous blog, but I do wonder if this was fated to happen. You know I'm not religious, but I still kind of feel like things happen for a reason. People's lives do follow patterns. Fit it into your personal philosophy however you can, but sometimes life plays out like someone is writing it.

I think there is a reason I'm here, in a new state. It's just suspicious to me that KJ lived through more than a decade of failing health, only to pass away shortly after getting the house of her dreams. If she'd died before we moved, I wouldn't have moved. It's like the universe placed me here because it has a plan for me here. 

And then we got her a puppy. We couldn't really afford a puppy, and we didn't have a good plan for integrating it into our household. Normally we wouldn't have made a bad decision like that, but somehow we fell into it.

KJ had been wanting a puppy for years, but it just didn't fit into our lives. Maybe the universe knew KJ was about to die, and wanted her last week to be as happy as possible - a puppy, a new home, etc.

And if any of the above is true, then I also believe that I've been positioned here for a reason. I predict that sometime in the next few years, I'll have an opportunity. I don't know what kind. Financial? Maybe. Romantic? Doubtful. Maybe I'll just meet some new lifelong friends.

But whatever it is, it will be an opportunity that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't moved here. Perhaps it was in the cards all along, a plan put in motion from the moment I lost my job in Tennessee. Or maybe it's all just random.

But if it was by design, I'd really like to ask the universe: Was this really the only way? Really?

But darker thoughts have also occurred to me. KJ hadn't been to the doctor since December. Usually she went every three months, so we would have had an appointment in March. But she's always hated doctors, and she'd been putting off getting a new doctor here.

Maybe if we'd stuck to the schedule, the new doc would have found something. Probably not, but it's possible. So in a way, I blame my old employer for this sequence of events. If they hadn't eliminated my position, then we never would have moved, and she would have gone to the doctor in March, and we would have kept living in that cramped little house. We wouldn't have been as happy there, but we wouldn't know what we were missing, and maybe she would have lived. Maybe.

Anything's possible.

So yeah, as you can see, my thoughts are still all over the place. But I do think I'm getting better.

Making Progress

My mom and I have been cleaning out some of KJ's stuff, dropping clothes off at thrift stores and selling  some of her DVDs and books. This is not going to be a short process - KJ had a lot of stuff, and I'll keep some of it. I'll be finding more things to sell for months if not years.

We're primarily focusing on cleaning up her bedroom in case I decide to get a roommate sometime later. KJ hoarded craft supplies, so I'm looking into local resources. I'd like to get them into the hands of other avid crafters.

The cats are starting to adjust. One of them - Quinn - has been pretty much in hiding since KJ passed. Quinn was "KJ's cat" more than the others, and spent a lot of time climbing on KJ and sleeping in her lap. But for the past week, Quinn has stayed out of sight, sleeping on my bed during the day, or staying in the cat room. But last night she came up to me and insisted I pet her for 20 minutes.

KJ's obituary appeared in the 4/25/2025 edition of the "Beloit Daily News." However, you'll need a subscription to read it, and I've found it's hard as hell to purchase a copy. Her dad had someone pick up a copy for me, but everyone else will have to settle for reading it on Facebook or here:

You'll notice it doesn't mention me. That was an accident; the website writes it for you, and has you put in keywords and fill in blanks like "hobbies" and "relatives." It didn't have a blank for spouse, but I assumed it would put me in there somewhere since I was the one filling out the form. I guess I was supposed to add myself as a relative.

But that's ok. I'm not a traditionalist. I didn't really want to do an obituary anyway, but too many people were asking about it. Mostly the older relatives who don't use Facebook and such, which is why I put it in that particular newspaper. That's where she was born, and her oldest relatives would be more likely to see it there.

We have her ashes now. I didn't buy an urn; there are too many creative people in my family for me to waste money on an expensive knick-knack that wouldn't match her tastes anyway. I'm still thinking about how she'd want to be stored, and I'm leaning towards a giant Coca-Cola can.

There's still paperwork to do, and a lot of it has to be done in a particular order. The car insurance won't let me take her name off until I get new titles in the mail, and the DMV wouldn't process those new titles until I had her death certificate, and the death certificate took a while in itself. It's a lot to deal with when you're already mourning.

All I'm saying is, never die if you can avoid it.

Awake Again

Bah, I can't sleep. I mean, I did sleep. I went to bed around 11, and woke up around 2. But now it's 3:23 and I can't get back to sleep.

The house is full of sleeping pills. KJ couldn't fall asleep without them. But I'm not fond of them. I saw what they did to her sometimes. They knocked her out so soundly that the house could have burned down around her. I don't want to surrender that much control, especially with no other humans in the house.

I did, however, take a Benadryl. My nose is stuffy.

The cats seem to know something is wrong. Kara sleeps with me all night as usual, but her daytime behavior has changed. Since she has no teeth, we supplement her diet with a "cat soup" treat every day. But she's refused to eat it the last two days.

Wicket looks confused, but he always looks confused, so the difference is subtle. Quinn is the most changed. She used to spend half her day in KJ's lap, but I barely saw the cat at all yesterday. I had to go find her, and she was asleep on my bed.

All the cats are more wary of the living room now. It probably has more to do with the puppy we temporarily hosted than KJ being gone. I've cleaned, but the room probably still smells like puppy to them.

Oh well, I'm going to take another stab at sleeping now.

Within Reach

KJ was one of the most amazing people I've ever met. She was creative, honest, sarcastic, kind, and intelligent. We met in mid-1993 through a mutual friend, and bonded over a shared love of Dean Koontz. We moved in together just a couple of months after met. We were married two years later.

When I first met KJ, she was a writer. She spent hours every day writing romance stories, and while she never published anything, her work was always impressive.

From there she went on to cross-stitch, crochet, pour painting, wood burning, jewelry making, resin crafting, and more. And she had a list of other mediums she wanted to try eventually, such as metal working, carpentry, sewing, and cosplay. She jumped from hobby to hobby like she wanted to sample all life had to offer.

We were obsessed with each other, to the point that we often ignored everyone else in the room. Some couples finished each other's sentences, but we didn't even need sentences. We often spoke to each other in movie quotes, and we almost achieved "Darmok at Tanagra" levels of communication.

In our early years together, she was an inexhaustible dynamo. I had trouble keeping up with her. Once we got our first digital camera, we began going to zoos and parks every weekend, and we loved taking pictures together. Money was always tight, but we found our bliss in whatever nature had to offer, and we searched high and low for photo opportunities.

I couldn't afford to give her the life she deserved, but she always told me she loved the life I gave her.

Then in September 2015, KJ had to go to the emergency room for diverticulitis. This was the beginning of the end. Her health was never the same afterwards. She never got all her energy back, and it was like the start of a cascade failure, health-wise.

In the following years she had several more operations, including partial thyroid removal and eye surgery. By the end she was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, she'd developed diabetes, nearly half of her teeth were fake, she had high blood pressure, she couldn't walk very far, and she had chronic body pains.

She still tried to stay busy, but her body couldn't keep up with her spirit. There was a lot she couldn't do, and for the past couple of years she mostly watched TV while crocheting. She fell into deep depression and developed a gambling addiction. She no longer wanted to watch anything new, preferring the comfort of shows she'd already seen dozens of times. She spent most of her time watching YouTube videos.

Moving out of Nashville helped her disposition a lot. Our new house brought her a lot of joy. She loved this town, and so do I. We could easily see ourselves growing old together in this house, sitting out on the screened-in front porch and watching the cars go by.

She was making progress, anyway. There's no way to be sure how it would have gone, but I know I saw improvement. We started watching new movies and TV shows again. She was greatly looking forward to the new Fantastic Four movie. And then we got the puppy, and it made her so happy. She'd wanted a dog for years.

If there's actually any rhyme or reason to the universe, an actual cosmic plot guiding our fates, then I'd like to believe her death was inevitable, and the universe was just trying to make her final days more comfortable.

I'd like to believe that. But I don't. They say it's always darkest just before the dawn, but in my experience the reverse is more often true. The universe just loves to give you false hope, putting the promised land within reach before it pulls the rug out from under you.

Screw this universe. I want my money back.

Slight Improvement

I'm doing ok tonight. I mean, I'm still devastated, but the despair isn't as big as it was. My mom is flying into town tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to seeing her. I'm seeing joy in the little things. I actually applied to a few jobs today - I was going to take a week or two off on the job hunt, but right this minute I think I have the energy to go to a job interview.

I might disagree tomorrow. I mean, my emotions are on a big see-saw right now. But I can always cancel an interview if I'm not feeling up to it when the day comes. And most of these places take a week or two to get back to me anyway. I do have a job interview on Tuesday, and I don't know if I'll go to it or not, but right now I'm thinking I could manage it.

I didn't accomplish much today, but I don't feel guilty about it. I needed the downtime. I wish I could write, but I'll probably need a couple of weeks to heal first.

Souvenirs

Everyone likes souvenirs, right? The EMTs left the following behind:

 

In case you can't see the image, it depicts a disposable mask for delivering oxygen, the instructions for said face mask (one corner partially chewed by a puppy), a sheet of toe tags with one missing, and the peel-off liners for some defibrillator pads.

This isn't a complaint. I'd rather the EMTs concentrate on saving lives than on cleaning up after themselves. But it's still not fun finding these things around your living room after a tragedy.

However, I can't bring myself to throw these items away. I still keep having thoughts that this is just a dream, that KJ's just in the other room, that she'll be back soon, and so on.

Have you ever been watching a movie, and you're looking down at your popcorn or something when a major character dies? But it happens so fast, and there's hardly any mention of it later, and you're like, "Wait, did they just kill off Admiral Ackbar?"

The EMTs were here for over two hours on Friday night. But in my mind, it still happened so fast that sometimes I can't believe it. Like, maybe KJ went out of town, and I only dreamed she died.

Whenever I start deluding myself, trying to convince myself that she's still alive somewhere, I glance at my pile of souvenirs. It grounds me, and keeps me in reality. I'll reduce the stack soon. I'll trash the instructions and the liners, and put the toe tags in a folder somewhere (I find them interesting enough to keep, despite their backstory).

But I'm going to keep the mask out for a while, at least until I receive KJ's ashes. Whenever I find myself questioning reality, I can look at the mask for confirmation. It's a punch in the gut every time I look at it, but it keeps me from questioning my memories.

They talk about the seven stages of grief, and I am plowing through them. But not in order, and there's a lot of regression. At random points throughout the day, I'll have periods of denial, anger, acceptance, denial again, and so on.

I've been watching comfort videos today. For the past few months, KJ and I have been watching a lot of reaction videos where people watch a popular movie for the first time. One of our favorites is Popcorn in Bed. The host of the channel missed a lot of major movies growing up, and watching her watch them is like seeing them for the first time.

KJ and I had nearly exhausted the channel, but we hadn't gotten around to watching the Star Wars ones. So today, I'm having a Star Wars reaction marathon. The videos are junk food for the soul, but they do cheer me up.

I had a sobbing fit when Luke's aunt and uncle died. I'd never cried for them before, not even when I first saw the movie as a little kid. Little things like that trigger me throughout the day. Most of the time I'm stable, if emotionally tired. Then I'll have a random thought and lose my cool.

But I think I am getting a little stronger. I still feel lost, confused, and more miserable than I've ever been, but I don't feel hopeless.

At least that's something.