Tom Sonday

Tommy and I always liked that phrase “Humans — make plans! God enjoys a good laugh!”

Yesterday, after I fell apart at work (again, sorry co-workers), I recalled advice I’d seen on another widow’s blog, where she said she was going to try and do things a few things she wanted to do because she was getting overwhelmed by all the things she now had to do.

I realized I’ve been under water (pun intended, as you’ll soon see) by the things I had to do: such as pay bills, clean out Tom’s closet, gets things retitled in my name, daily deal with the 20 pieces of mail he still receives, continue whittling away at the thank-you cards from such generous people contributing in his memory, load / unload the dishwasher, clean the gutters, winterize his bees, grocery shop (which I hate), fix the food, eat it all because, as if cooking wasn’t hard enough, cooking for one is even more challenging …. whine whine whine. I wasn’t finding time to do the things I want to do.

Yesterday, I decided I would take today as a vacation day and do a few things I wanted to do. Call me a two-year-old, but doggone it, living my life without Tom is doing a huge thing I don’t want to do — and having to now do all the other things I don’t want to do was beating me down. Time for something fun (other than beating Ben at Scrabble.)

Humans — make plans! God enjoys a good laugh!

Ben is still here, and about midnight we wandered into Tom’s office. Ben, being young and male, was warm enough such that he wasn’t wearing shoes. (Otherwise, it might’ve been months before I discovered this …)

“Mom, the floor’s kind of wet here,” he said, moving his enormous feet up and down so I could hear the squish of saturated carpet.

Yep, it was wet. Not damp, not moist. Wet. And it wasn’t just where Ben was standing, it encompassed a quarter of Tom’s office, originating from a closet of mysterious mechanical stuff, and the water probably would’ve spread further if it hadn’t been soaked up by the dozen boxes of papers and stacks of magazines Tom had stored in that corner.

The water was coming from the mysterious mechanical stuff, and based on the mold, saturated dry wall, and disintegrated papers, it’d been coming for a while. Guess I couldn’t put off cleaning Tommy’s office any longer.

So, it is early afternoon on Friday. Ben is still carrying out dripping piles of disintegrated papers that I’ve sorted through; we’re trying to stay out of the way of my beloved handy neighbor Wayne who is replacing our leaky bladder. (I thought there was a prescription drug for that.) Brother-in-law Jim is headed over shortly to help sort perhaps critical paper smear-stacks. Turns out I may have found the tax documents we’d searched everywhere else for …. not that they’re much intact now. Only the pets are happy about this, as they have a new, large, convenient watering hole in the basement. But, Wayne promises that he’ll have everything up and running again today so it should go away — or at least that’s his plan.

Humans — make plans! God enjoys a good laugh!