Three unknown strangers to the left, then me, Paul, the Statue of Liberty, Rick, Anne is seated in front.

I seem to have lost my 2005 calendar so this is all recollection at this point. Some of it is engraved on my brain, some of it seems to have just slipped away. I need to speed up the writing before more of it goes!

*****

When I found this picture, I saw the rest of the album which had included a visit in mid-June from my old college roommate Suzanne and her son Nate. We were able to meet for a good part of one day while they were on their way to meet the rest of her family in New Jersey maybe (her older son Jesse was at school in Massachusetts, so it may have been further north!). Sue had asked to visit Thomas's grave so I picked her up from the Metro I believe, which is just a couple of miles south of the cemetery and we drove up Georgia Avenue to Gate of Heaven. She said a prayer and paused for a few minutes to just spend a little time. Sue and her boys had seen Thomas just before he left for basic training so this grave was not an abstraction, but the resting place of someone she had known a little when he was an adult.

In June, Anne decided to return to the east coast for a vacation with her husband and her son Paul (who is a year older than Matthew). The plan was for me to join them with Matthew in New York City, though in the end Matthew felt too shy to go, and then have Anne and Paul come here for a few days. I felt a bit odd and adventurous getting on the train by myself and heading for Penn Station on a summer day, but found the hotel with no problem (it really is hard for me to navigate in strange places but the grid system of NYC is a great help to the directionally dyslexic).

We did a lot of walking around and touring and all was pretty well until we did a harbor tour past the Statue of Liberty and looking back at the oddly bereft skyline. One of the guides talked about the firehouse that had suffered the greatest losses on 9/11 and their little gift shop--I think to support the surviving families but I wasn't taking notes--and I burst into tears. Poor Anne just wrapped her arm around my shoulders and let me weep until I stopped. Something about being aware of the timeline and sequence of events from September 11, 2001 to November 11, 2004 overwhelmed me for those few moments.

But this may be one of the first times that I remember noticing that, once I had stopped crying, the episode was over and I could go on with the rest of the day not as if nothing had happened, but just not weighed down by that storm of grief. I've started thinking of it like rain bands surrounding hurricanes--they sweep in and they sweep out, leaving puddles but not always lingering floods.

No one seemed to have noticed me crying.

I'm trying to remember February of 2005. A number of things came up: my mother-in-law needed to change residences and I found a place a couple of miles from us for her, there was a Mardi Gras party, there was the feeling that I was losing count. One of the things I did (that I found out from one of those books that people gave us was not that unusual): I had been counting the weeks since Thomas died. Sometime in February, I let it go. Initially of course it had been hours, then days, then once I got past the first two weeks, it went to just weeks. Now I count months, not fanatically. On Sunday it will be three years.

I just don't remember much. Maria was home, going to Montgomery College. Anna was home, still working. Matthew was in school, I was trying to run the PTA (not well, I'm afraid though after the January meeting, several members came up to me to tell me how much better I looked in January than I had in December). I was finding that most conversations circled back to Thomas and his story.

Well, maybe more will come back to me. Let's move on to March which is also kind of a blur. We moved my mother-in-law to the apartment near us. I turned 50, Richard turned 52 but I don't remember doing much of anything special. I was beginning to feel less like I was in shock every day and more like a functioning human being. Except that I would cry pretty often when I got in the car. I'd be driving down the road near our house, sobbing, not the safest practice because that road is actually a killer even under the best of conditions. Crying is not the best of conditions.

One thing we did in March was to establish legally that Richard and I were in charge of Thomas's estate, which was actually more substantial than you might think since he never bought a car and apparently only spent money on clothes, the television, and maybe some video games. He must have eaten too. Maybe not enough. So he had about $11,000 in his bank account. This had involved going to the Clerk of the Court in Montgomery County, putting a notice in the Burtonsville Gazette, and it seems to me a few other hoops. Anyway, this was basically a formality, just one more thing to get out of the way. We took my mother-in-law on this trip for some reason, I think because the Social Security Office she needed was also in Rockville, near the Courthouse. She was a little overwhelmed by the security she had to go through at the front door of the Courthouse.

Recounting this, it all seems pretty surreal. You are trying to adjust to a life that will never include Thomas as a physical presence, and at the same time you are trying to tie up the loose ends of his life on earth. I miss him.