You'll find this really boring. I promise.

And it's all probably going to make absolutely no sense to you. But you, dear Reader who really isn't there (I can't believe anyone would be THAT bored to read this crap), is going to be my "audience." I'm writing this for you, because I have to learn again how to exercise my atrophied writing muscles.

It's been a long time since I've written anything. And just think, I used to get paid for doing this.

I made some really critical decisions today, and they're about the first words I've put to paper (so to speak) since my husband died a year ago yesterday.

The only writing I've done in the past two years has been on message boards, either feverishly trying to find out how to keep the cancer he had from completely wasting him away, or on other internet spaces, trading barbs with online friends while making stealthy fun of conspiracy theory kooks, the kind who think Dick Cheney was the guy who staged the moon landing at a Universal City backlot.

The quick and easy way I had with words died somewhere between my last job writing and when my husband was first diagnosed (July 4, 2005, as he stood in front of the sink shucking the broiled corn from the grill into a bowl, I peeled hot tomatoes, chatting, looked at him in the light and said, "You know, you're really yellow!" Jaundice. It's your gall bladder, they'll do a quick laparoscopy, few stiches and voila! Good as new. But on July 6, 2005, the first in the phalanx of drs. over the next year gave a different diagnosis: pancreatic cancer.)

You'd think that that's the reason for this blog name. You'd be wrong.

I heard that phrase again on the news, probably for the eight millionth time this week, that the "survivors" (of whatever) are "grappling for answers." That phrase always reminds me of one of the big glass box gizmos in the boardwalk arcade of my childhood. You fed the thing with a few quarters and turned a wheel, then from the top of the box, a huge clawlike hook would descend toward a rainbow colored pile of prizes. Your job was to spin the wheel and press a button, or some such thing, at the moment the claw dove into mound of tantalizing gimcrackery. If you were lucky, the claw would clutch a coveted item, and you had to hold, hold, hold the thing until you swung the claw over to the trap where it would release the item and into my greedy little hands.

The blissful result of making it all the way through the breathtaking game of skill was more great crap to pile up in your bedroom so you could amaze your friends and piss off your mother.

That was the ideal, anyway. I never got anything (really.) I always dropped the prize. Maybe because I wasn't lucky enough, or God hated me, or the glass box thing was rigged, or (most likely) my covetousness outstripped my coordination at age 9.

So the first time in my life I heard how someone would "grapple for answers," I remember thinking how very hard that must be. I sure was never able to "grapple" very well, and all the boardwalk crap in my room was from my cousins winning it for me (my father just tried to bribe the concessionaires, because he was pretty awful at trying to knock down the pyramided cast iron milk bottles, all to get me the frilly pink poodle crap my girly heart desired.)

But here I am, enough years away from childhood to figure out that the glass box needed my nine-year-old eyes to reflect quite so brightly, and that nothing was as it seemed.

Not then. Not now.

When I hear for the umpteenth time about how the survivors are "grappling," or the victims are grappling, or the authorities are grappling, it just makes me wonder if humanity is doomed to be stupid for eternity by the use of such idiotic cliches. People need answers? Suppose there are none? Or none you'll know this side of being six feet under yourself?

I wonder if they all go answer-grappling on the day of (fill in the blank) tragedy, or if they bring home the big glass box with the claw arm and grapple while relaxing in their media rooms.

What amazes me so is how easy it is, by sticking to the script, to cheapen events and emotions that are profound and private. Maybe it's because a TV reporter really has to say something trite (I wonder what perverseness there is in God to put that tendency in all of us), maybe she's gotta sum up "the disaster, the pictures, the bodies, the numb family members, the officials, and then the implication that "it didn't have to happen," followed by the aforesaid grappling....when the reporter knows, and the families know, and the victims (surely dead, or the grappling isn't as dramatic) know: sometimes there are no frigging answers.

Maybe living while you try to figure out what THAT'S about is really what hell is.

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So, dear Reader, please forgive the above stream of writing exercise, failed efforts to be clever, and the agonizingly boring result of me trying to work out what a year without my dh is supposed to be like.

Like I said, you will find it boring. But you're the witness to the first time I put one foot in front of the other with a goal since I kissed his fingers - oozing with fluid from all the bags of fluid they gave him to try to keep him alive, the fluid having nowhere to go but through every pore of his body - one by one, his fingers, his beautiful, sensitive, graceful fingers, each one kissed by me for the very last time.