How am I?

 Everybody asks how I am.  (I just misspelled that "who I am."  Freudian slip?)  How do I know how I am?  I am in a whirl, a muddle.  I am spinning around, trying to keep upright.  Most often I reply that "I've been better," which covers a multitude of sins.  (It's also my inappropriate humour mechanism.)  I'm trying to keep going.  I'm trying not to just sit here in misery and wait for the misery to stop.  Because it will be a long time before it stops.  And nobody really cares about my misery except me, so what's the point of dwelling on that?  They care about me paying the bills on time.  Some of them care about me eating, or sleeping, or eating "right," whatever that might be.  (No, thank you, I do *not* need oil of oregano.  It wouldn't help.  "It couldn' hoit!")

I am reminded of the time I moved to Kitimat for a teaching job.  Five minutes after I got into town, people were asking how I liked Kitimat.  How did I know?  I hadn't been there long.  I had no idea what it was like.  So, in the same way, I don't know how I am.  I am trying to figure that out, myself.

Policies and procedures

 Everything is harder and takes longer than I expect.  I am inefficient.  (Yes, thank you, I am well aware that for forty years I have been annoying people with the hypothesis that efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of business success, and that the pandemic has finally proven my case, by demonstrating the seven decades of the relentless pursuit of "market efficiencies" and "trimming the fat" and "lean and mean" has meant that capitalism was completely unprepared for the pandemic, and the pandemic's impact on supply chains thoroughly demonstrated that "outsourcing" and "no margins" also meant no resilience.  I'm not talking about that level of efficiency, I'm talking about wasted effort.)

I have no procedures.  Nothing is automatic.  Anything I go to do, I have to check whether everything I need is in place.  (Some of that is because I don't know where K&L put a lot of stuff.  Not that they didn't help.  They did, and they did an amazing job--but nobody is perfect, particularly when it comes to predicting what somebody else will need, long before they need it.)

Everything I go to do, I also have to figure out why I am doing it.  Did we do this because Gloria wanted it so?  Or because it is really necessary?  And, if Gloria wanted it so, did she have a good reason for it?  (She usually did.  But her system of accounting, for example, was predicated on the requirement to prove to family court what level of support she needed.  I don't think I will need to prove anything to a divorce court any time in the near future.)

I also have a tendency to do everything as it presents itself, because I don't have any processes in place to "bring forward" items that I will need later.  I relied on Gloria for a lot of that, but there is also the fact that a whole bunch of work is looming over me, and I need to know that it gets done, so I might as well do it now, but that also means that I have to stop what I was doing, and so, possibly, lose the prep that I did for that.

Fair warning ...

 Note to Lucky Mobile, Bell Mobility, and other communications or tech services who think they can get away with support services that do not provide any actual support: do not annoy and ignore grieving widowers.  They are already mad at the world, and they have an awful lot of time, and no restraining influences to prevent them from doing the most detailed and damaging review of your so-called services ...

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care ...

 Well, I can't sleep.

Again.

I've often had problems sleeping.  It's gotten worse as I've gotten older, as seems to happen frequently.  And I need sleep.  I generally need more than the traditional eight hours, although I can function on less, and sometimes have, for very long periods, which I find odd.

The thing is, I don't sleep well without Gloria.

I first noticed this when I was out doing the seminars.  It wasn't jet lag: even if the seminar was in Calgary or Los Angeles I still had trouble sleeping.  And I mean real trouble sleeping.  I'd be out for a week doing the seminars, and most of the week I'd be getting two hours sleep a night.  On occasion (and not all that infrequently) I wouldn't be able to get any sleep all night.  The thing is, the seminars are pretty intense, not just for the candidates, but I have to stand up there for forty hours, and talk, sometimes to seminars that have half a dozen candidates who have fifteen to twenty years experience in different specialty fields of security, and not make a fool of myself.  It's a bit difficult.  So, initially, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to function without getting "enough" sleep.  However, after a while I realized that I was able to do the seminars just fine, even if I wasn't getting much sleep.  (I can recall seminars that I only got about eight hours sleep for the entire week.)  Eventually, I even used it to my advantage.  Business travel may seem romantic, but you really only see the insides of airports, airplanes, and hotel rooms.  All the tourist stuff is closed except for the times that I was actually in front of a seminar, so I had to do my sight-seeing at 4:30 AM when I couldn't sleep.  (Scared the pants off the RCMP security detail at 24 Sussex Drive at 4:30 AM one time, but that's another story.)

Over the years, I tried all the usual suspect sleep options.  Hot bath, warm milk, big meal before bed, melatonin, Nytol, American antihistamines (the ones we get in Canada are mostly all the "non-drowsy" kind, but American antihistamines all used to use some form of diphenhydramine, which is basically what Nytol is), avoiding screens before bed.  None of them worked.  (Or, rather, most of them worked.  Once.  And then never worked again.)

(Out doing the seminars I did hot baths for two reasons.  One was to try to get to sleep.  The other was that, for old legs like mine, standing in front of a group for eight hours a day your legs get really tired and painful, and a good soak helps a lot.  And then I did a seminar in Norway, at a resort, and there wasn't a tub in the entire resort except for some hydrotherapy thing, so I made do with the steam room and sauna.)

Of course, as Gloria got weaker before she went into hospital, I was stressed, so I wasn't getting much sleep.  And then she was in hospital, so I wasn't getting much sleep.  And then I was sleeping at the hospital, so I wasn't getting much sleep.  And then she died.

Since then I've had a couple of nights when I've had close to eight hours of broken sleep.  Certainly never more.  Mostly I've been getting about five hours sleep.  And it's not that I can't get to sleep, initially, but that eventually I wake up, very early, and then can't get back to sleep.  This morning I woke up at 1:30, tried to stay in bed for an hour, but eventually realized I wasn't going to get any more sleep, so I'm up writing this.  And none of the traditional sleep "aids" address waking up too early.

Hopefully I'll get back to getting some sleep, eventually.  I don't know how long I can go on this sleep deprivation routine.  (Gloria was irked when I set my email "personal name" field to "Rob Slade, the famous sleep deprivation experiment."  When Ryan was born, she suggested "Rob Slade, the doting Grandpa of Ryan," and I liked that, so I've been known as "Grandpa Rob" in security circles ever since.)  When I worked at the hospital, many year ago, you generally chose either days and nights, or days and afternoons.  I did days and nights for four years, and managed to survive.  But twenty years later (and almost three decades ago, now) I did some more night shift and it practically killed me.

Is this grief?  The lack of a schedule?  Too much change all at once?

Take my wife ... please ...

 When I was teaching the seminars, Gloria would sometimes be driving me to the airport at 3 AM in order to catch a flight.  (Actually, usually it was me driving, and Gloria slowly waking up so that she could drive the car home after I got out at the airport.)  I would make some silly comment, and Gloria would look at me and say that she knew that I reacted to stress and sleeplessness by making jokes, but she didn't.  And she couldn't particularly handle jokes when she was tired.

(Come to think of it, Gloria mentioned that several times over the past year, as well.  Maybe she was trying to warn me of something?)

K&L, and the grandkids, simply refer to my "inappropriate humour."

A couple of the people I have talked to, recently, have said that I must be doing pretty well, because I sound cheerful and upbeat.  Of course, I am not cheerful and upbeat.  I am morose and depressed.  But I learned a long time ago, that people don't care if you are morose and depressed, and they don't want to deal with you if you are morose and depressed.  They like it better if you make jokes.  So, I got very fast and skilled at making jokes.  Regardless of the situation, and whether appropriate or not.  It's part of my coping mechanism.

Another part of my coping mechanism is persistence.  We, as a species, are persistence hunters.  Pretty much anything can outrun us--over the short term.  But long term, we can chase down pretty much anything if we keep gong.  Just keep going until what we are trying to track gets exhausted.  We can outlast pretty much anything.

I've been a depressive for more than five decades.  One of the things about depression is that you get tired, and stop doing things.  But my depression is cyclical.  (It used to be called manic-depressive of depressive type, but that doesn't fit well with the new DSM-V "bipolar" terminology.  Even my mental illness is non-standard.)  So, I just keep going until I outlast it.  When Ryan was little he loved the book "Are You My Mother," with the repeated refrain of "And the baby bird went on."  I modified that, for myself, to, "And the tubby beard went on."  So, I just keep going.  It's become more than just a coping mechanism; it's a big part of the way I tackle anything.  Faced with a problem, or starting a project, I'll just start, anywhere, with anything, even if there are lots of things I haven't got yet.  Do what you can with what you have right now.  When more comes you will already have some parts accomplished.  And, if you know Seligman's theory of learned helplessness, you know that accomplishing anything, even if it's a kind of false achievement, helps you out of the depression.  Eventually.  If you keep at it.

Gloria, of course, knew that.  She knew that I was a depressive when she married me.  She wondered if she could handle it, because one of her friends was married to a depressive and had a really difficult time with it.  But, over time, she came to see that, even when I got into a deep depression, I was still determined, and still kept going, even if only in the smallest way.  She came to value my persistence and determination, and that fact that, no matter what, I just kept taking the next step ...

There's a funny story about that ...

The great physician

 Martin hangs around with us in the security community, but he's actually a doctor.  He works (sometimes) for a company that makes medical software, which is, I assume, why he started hanging out with us.  I should also mention that he doesn't just hang out with us: he makes good contributions.  He has written a book, "Rethinking the Electronic Healthcare Record," and it should be required reading for anyone who is involved is systems development or even just basic programming.  He is talking, specifically, about medical records management, but he goes to the heart of determining the real requirements for a system, and how just throwing together some functions that are directed towards your goal, but don't really target the heart of it, can be worse than useless.  An awful lot of systems make that mistake, and would benefit tremendously from taking his approach.

Early during Gloria's hospital time, a sub-group of us (and Martin is part of that group) were discussing some of the details of what she was going through and the minimal information that I was getting from the hospital.  Martin wasn't party to that discussion, but he contacted me privately, and offered to help explain any of the medical issues that I didn't understand, which was kind of him (and yet one more example of my security colleagues offering more useful help than an awful lot of my supposedly closer friends).  I had, by this time, mentioned pleural effusion, and Martin told me to keep bugging them about the cytology on the fluid.

(I've just checked my email archive for accuracy, and I'm shortening this somewhat, but I don't think I'm doing a disservice to the discussion.  Also, it reminded me that this was a month ago.  So much has happened, it just seems a blur, and yet maybe only a few days ago ...)

It took a while for the cytology to come back, but I kept bugging them about it, so, when it did come back, they told me right away, and pretty baldly, that there were cancerous cells, adenosarcoma.  Now, to lots of people, The Big C is still considered a death sentence.  But, even though my sister and Gloria's brother had died of it, both Gloria's Mum and Dad had survived cancer, my aunt was a cancer survivor, and Gloria herself had survived the non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  So, death wasn't my first thought when they said cancer, although I knew if it came back, particularly in a different place, it wasn't great.  Martin hadn't said adenosarcoma, in his message to me, but he had thought it.  (Pretty good diagnosis and prognosis skills, from 7,000 miles away.)  And, when I reported this to him, his immediate response was to ask if they were planning palliative care.

I knew what that meant.

And it would be almost a week before the hospital would allow themselves to use that word.  After all, they don't want to tell someone that their loved one is doomed to die, until they have exhausted all the other possibilities.

The details of Gloria's death, and the exact timing, were a bit more complicated.  (The oncology report, when it did come in, implied that, if Gloria had either been treated or gone home, her remaining time would have been filled with pain and discomfort.)  But Martin had been right the first time, and so I had to take seriously the second implication.  So Martin, from 7,000 miles away, was my first advance warning, and gave me more time to prepare for Gloria's death.

He's really good at what he does.

Happy New Year!

 Happy New Year!

Nope, Gloria's still dead.

I feel kinda bad.  I feel like I've let Gloria down.  I didn't stay up until past midnight.  Gloria never did mornings well, so, after we arranged for her early retirement, she basically didn't do mornings at all: there was no need.  So, we were regularly up until one or two in the morning.  So staying up until midnight at New Years?  Piece of cake.  Nothing to it.  Nothing special, even.

But, what with the lack of sleep, I just couldn't make it last night.  I fell asleep during "Death in Paradise" (and I probably dozed through bits of it last night, too, both being parts of a two-parter, so I'll probably have to watch both of them all over again), so I went to bed around 10:30.  So I got about seven hours sleep, which isn't bad these days, but not enough if I'm ever going to get back to full efficiency ...

I'm not sure whether I'm a morning person.  Before I married Gloria, I had been getting up regularly at 6 AM for a decade or more.  Not necessarily by choice, but a combination of requirements and not wanting to upset the schedule too much between times.  I don't bound out of bed with limitless energy in the morning, but I do tend to get working (even if it's just email) right away.  I don't drag around waiting for my first cup of coffee, which is probably a good thing, because I don't drink coffee very much.