My wife, Sandi Mrowka, died one year ago today.

I’m still just at the beginning of the journey of grief.

We had a little more than thirteen years together, 2011 to 2024.

She was a force to be reckoned with — those people she cared about, she really loved; but those people who mistreated her, she cut out of her life with the skill of a surgeon.

Sandi remembered people and the details of their lives with such clarity: the name(s) of their cats (and kids and spouses, etc), the way they wrote & spoke, and most of the words they had ever said to her.

She was a bit of a music savant, identifying artist & title within a few notes of hearing a song; and she knew the backstories of many of them.

I could go on for pages about Sandi, but it hurts too much to write any more right now. She was the love of my life, whether or not i always realized it at the time; and it will probably take thirteen years to heal, even if i never really get over losing her.

❤️❤️❤️

Cancer: it may not define you, but it may come to dominate your life. Do everything you can to complete items on your bucket list; don’t let rounds of chemo keep you from doing what’s important — living every second of life that you can. That’s what Sandi taught me.

“Putting up with irrationality is the foundation for every relationship.” ~James Wilson (on House, M.D.)

Things don’t last, so don’t expect them to.

People hear what they want to hear.
And people do what they want to do.

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Platitudes & Clichés — that’s mostly all people say.

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Am i wrong?
Please tell me your individual opinion, about anything!

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(I really am going to have to figure out formatting, huh?)

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Sure, maybe i’d thought about writing, or being a teacher, back when i gave a damn about life; but no more.

There isn’t any point, i see now. Nobody much cares about teaching or learning or writing. They just go on with their drab little lives and try not to pay any attention to inflation, corrosive politics, or the widening gap between the 1% and the 99.

I was glad to have been removed from the workforce, glad to have escaped the increasingly pointless rat race. Nothing means much anymore. It doesn’t matter as much anymore if you go to university, except as a wealth-marker. AI and robots will be doing most jobs soon enough. Existential despair is on the horizon.

People’s main jobs soon will be simple consumption and also watching over the machines that produce. No wonder the birthrate has fallen — who wants to bring more people into this mess?

I have a little voice inside me that every time i hear an English sentence or read an English sentence, it wants to correct that sentence if there are any “errors”.

It’s a curse.

I was an English major at Cornell University. Yes, a misfit one, but also with a long history of reading a lot of books. And then i took a variety of linguistics & more English classes at other schools — UNC Chapel Hill, Arizona State University, and Framingham State College.

Yes, my approach to language is more computational than others, partly because i was a Physics major before English, and partly because i’ve worked with computers for forty-some years.

Maybe it’s all the proofreading and editing i’ve done; maybe that’s the voice.

But i still have my own English-language idiosyncrasies, as you have probably noticed. I do not care; i like my English.

Rely on yourself, on your own conclusions. Other people generally don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, except in the specifics of their own lives. Trust yourself, always.

Being alone doesn’t have to be that bad.

My wife of 13 years died last year, and i’m alone now.

I was alone for much of my younger years, and i’ve gotten used to being alone again; it’s not so bad, doing what you want, when you want.

Do you have kids?
I don’t have kids. (And like me, my wife never wanted kids; so she didn’t have any either.)
Also, the rest of my family is mostly dead or far away; so i don’t have to worry about that.

It’s a nice quiet existence.

And it is easier, being alone. Not having to keep track of a whole ‘nother life; one is more than enough for me. Sure, nobody to tell stuff to; but when you’re older, there isn’t so much to tell anyway.

Life slows down, but time speeds up. The years go by, one after another.

Enjoy what you can.

Real life is pretty boring, most parts of it at least. Fiction is an artificial construction of things that seem a little bit like real life, but put together in much more interesting ways.

I didn’t get to participate much in real life; i became disabled pretty early on (age 21) and didn’t get to work much of a real job. I did get to finish my undergraduate degree, appropriately enough in English.

So i love the way that you can use language to create a world — an interesting world — fairly unconnected to reality. I don’t actually like real people much anymore; i prefer fiction.

And it turns out that i didn’t miss much, not working. I was never going to be well-off; i probably would have struggled like most people, no matter what i did — regardless of my aptitude. The American Dream seems officially dead, to me. So i’ll just spin out the next twenty-five or thirty years as peacefully as i can (and hopefully find things to enjoy, probably mostly fictional).

I read someone’s post on Sincerely about love, and it got me thinking.

If you’re lucky, you will meet someone who genuinely loves you — a combination of respect and caring and concern for how you’re feeling — and you’ll happen to respect them and want to care for their well-being too.

It’s a difficult and rare combination to find. And it doesn’t always last, either. Life changes people, including me and including you.

Realistically, even true love can falter. Please don’t have an over-idealized view of love, or you may be disappointed. But true love can also recover (sometimes) from major fights, problems, and serious disagreements. And people make mistakes, big and small, all the time; everyone has difficulties.

The test of love is whether or not it can survive real problems — medical, financial, personal, et cetera — because problems eventually come.

And even if you do find some perfect love, one of you will eventually sicken and/or die. And the survivor will have to go on without that love.

Everybody dies. All love ends at some point.

I was pretty happy being alone in the first place, so i was prepared.

Halloween, if you hadn’t noticed, was Sandi‘s favorite holiday.

Last Halloween, there was a large gathering of friends and ministers at our apartment to give Sandi a grand Samhain ritual as a kind of a going-away present. Singing & chanting, with everyone gathered around her bed. It was lovely.

She died almost exactly seven days later.

She held on as long as she could, fighting constant pain and discomfort. She didn’t complain, but just nodded when i asked her if it was time for more pain relief.

We both did our best; that’s what any marriage boils down to. It was enough.

If you ever help someone fight their final battle, right to their last breath, it may change your outlook on life.

Even though i’m ok with being alone, life is never going to be the same again.

Do not enter into a relationship with someone who can’t fully take care of themselves. It’s bad enough that inequalities may develop later on; relationships should not start with such inequalities.

You know how much work relationships take; don’t take on an unnecessary extra job! When you’re dating someone, try to notice how well they’re doing on their own; if they are struggling, it’s a bad sign.

Instead of becoming involved with them, have the patience to encourage them AS A FRIEND to get their shit together on their own. Once they’ve shown that they can get by on their own — say, for a whole year — then you can consider going out with them. 

And if you do decide on another relationship, try to keep it casual — you don’t want to spend your time taking care of someone who can’t take care of themselves.

Don’t get sucked into a relationship-trap. You’ll have enough work ahead of you with your own life without taking on someone else’s issues. Take it slow. Take it easy.

If it seems like someone needs you, back away slowly; they’re not ready.

Try to only be involved with people as equals.