It’s Pride Sunday here in NYC (we are big enough to have several Prides, but today is the big one in Manhattan). I was looking forward to actually going, but I still look a fright from my fall last week. I’m not in pain at all, unless you for some reason decide to squeeze the top of my nose, but I have one-and-a-half black eyes, and the lower lip still has a swollen bit and so on. I was startled to find myself, while on my lunch break from the office on Thursday, to have a nosebleed in the middle of what was an unusually nice Chinese restaurant, just as the entree hit the table. (clearly the hot and sour soup opened up my sinuses a bit too much) A hankerchief shoved in my face and some frantic arm-waving got my check quickly paid and lunch wrapped up. Made it back to the office, dealt with the nosebleed in the bathroom (crime scene, which I cleaned up), shoved a paper towel up my left nostril, and quickly took a cab home.

I’ve been fine since then, but worried friends encouraged me to see a doctor, so I went to Urgent Care on Friday afternoon, who didn’t really see anything much, but sent me to get my nose x-rayed. Good news – my nose is not broken and I don’t really need to do anything except apply warm compresses to my eyes to make the black eyes go away faster… unless the nosebleeds keep happening, and then I should see an ENT, which I will do. Lots of nosebleed-related discussion in the comments on FB – I don’t normally get nosebleeds at all, but had a weird situation 25 years ago where I had a blood blister thing up in my sinuses that ended up requiring a surgical procedure where my ENT lasered the thing shut, which worked.

Anyway, this punim is not ready for prime time right now, so… getting stuff done at home today.

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Speaking of getting stuff done, I’m a big fan of GTD, a time-management system, whose central tenet is simply getting things out of your head into a trusted system. Simple example: rather than having part of your brain nagging you with ‘you need to buy milk’, you just put ‘milk’ on your shopping list and don’t think about it again.

This blog is mostly-unabashedly solipsistic. My buddy Theresa Stroll was giving me a ride from Mikado rehearsal to the train station once and we were talking about our blogs. “Mine’s about health and fitness, what’s yours about?” Me, “um…. me”. It’s a place to dump thoughts and feelings and personal history, and that’s partially so I don’t then trap people at parties and bore them to death. This may be boring, but I’m not trapping anyone to read it.

But it occurred to me when I reviewed the year post that it was largely about my own handling of the anniversary of Charles’s death, and very little actually about Charles. So, Eric, how did Charles’s death affect him?

Well, we don’t know, do we, that’s what a large chunk of philosophy and religion is about. I love to think about how he’s a central-casting angel now, off doing good works. But of course maybe there isn’t a Charles any more, at least not in a form we could ever recognize. But there is no longer a Charles who works at a job and cooks dinner and watches old movies and makes up dumb alternate lyrics to songs with his adoring husband.

I think the most ‘godDAMMIT’ thing that comes to mind is that he never got to retire. He never really got to just enjoy himself, puttering around and doing whatever the hell he wanted. He kind of got close, those last two years – his job was really easy and didn’t take up a lot of effort… but he became less and less able to do (physical) things, and that was frustrating. For the most part, he was really conscientious about his health and well-being – he was an obsessive flosser, for instance – and was always far more attentive to the neatness and cleanliness of his home and his person than I ever was (and did this cause domestic strife between us? Oh yes). So to have him take such care and planning about his health and well-being – financially, too – and then having it be largely for naught is … well, ‘sad’ works.

We’d floated the idea for years of getting a second home down in Cape May – we never got to do that. We’d discussed getting a dog and two cats once he retired – we never got to do that. There were a thousand places he still wanted to travel to – and he remained pissed off that the year we went to Spain, my awful job wouldn’t let me take enough time off to do the very thorough tour he’d planned for years. So there was a lot of living that we had on our list that he will not ever get to do now. (yes, you don’t need to point it out, I still get to do it… and will as long as I can)

Which is not to say he didn’t live. It was a very full and fantastic life in that regard. This was a man who, if he had followed societal pressure, would have stayed in the suburbs, maybe never gone to college, possibly gotten married to a lady. He had a somewhat traumatic childhood – his dad died when he was about eleven, his older brother went off to Vietnam and he was stuck with his alcoholic crazy mother until he finally could leave and stay with his uncle and aunt. But, after an abortive attempt at college, he moved to the city (‘why do you want to leave us’, his family cried, even though he was at most two hours away) and lived the dream, getting acting jobs and become quite skilled in the restaurant biz. I wish I’d been around for that part, it sounds like he had a fantastic time. Lots of travel, some great relationships, made some lifelong friends who are still part of my life.

I came along at the right time as he hit his nesting phase, where he’d gone back to college, become an IT professional and wanted to buy a home. And he did all that, with me right by his side, and creating this showplace of a home to entertain and feed his loved ones was a tremendous achievement, and one he knocked out of the park, frankly. Now we were traveling together, and boy did we have some great trips.

One of the things I had to figure out quickly when we started our lives together is that he was not ‘smart in a Peterson way’. My family is all about literacy and knowledge and facts rather than emotions – to a fault. C was, I think, an undiagnosed dyslexic, and found reading difficult and misspelled and mispronounced things all the time. (and I learned very quickly just to leave that alone – and also not to, for instance, give him books as gifts unless he asked for them) But he was so smart in people-ways that the Petersons are not good at – emotional intelligence, social skills, reading people. I cannot tell you how many times he met an old friend of mine, and five minutes later had them pegged in a way that had just never occurred to me, but which was completely true. (this sometimes meant that flaws that I didn’t see or could ignore were dealbreakers to him, and there were people I loved who he didn’t like at all. I suppose that’s true for any couple.)

Bad things, of course: When I met him, he was very active in and grew strength from his church, St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, which was somehow at the time very gay- and women-friendly. It became less so in such a way that he eventually gave up on it, and never did find another church to be a home. Although I’m the child of atheists and consider myself to be agnostic, I was really sad that something that had given him such joy and strength had become not-available. I don’t think he ever stopped believing in God – or praying – but we didn’t really discuss it, and I know that his faith was shaken.

He had a hideous experience during 9/11, far worse than most of us, and it affected him at the most basic level. He did get counseling for a while, but he didn’t think it helped and gave it up. (as I’ve said, he wasn’t ever inclined to be ‘led’ anywhere, stubborn as fuck) And he had a harder time than most, I think, dealing with the country’s fuckery during the GW Bush years and particularly with Trump.

So he was a real person, with inherent flaws and external trials, but with such strength and goodness and love and caring. And he worked so hard all his life, and achieved so much. An astonishing man, and very much my hero, and he absolutely is the best thing to happen to me (bringing it back to me as always).

What a life. I wish there had been more of it.