Susan Oleksiw

February 20, 2025
 
As I look at this date, and then the date on the previous post, I'm appalled that I have been silent in this space for almost a year. It hardly seems possible, but it is. My niece occasionally asks me if I've been posting regularly on Thursdays as I said I intended. Fortunately, our conversation moves on quickly and more than shaking my head in chagrin, nothing more is said.
 
A lot has happened in the last year. As you might imagine, a lot changes for someone when their life partner of 55 years dies. My experience hasn't been so different from other women losing a partner. I passed through the stage of seeing something interesting and thinking, I should tell Michael about that. He'd loved hearing that. Then came, I wish I could tell Michael about that. And after that, the less interesting, Oh, look at that. My response to minor catastrophes was about the same. I'm now at the stage of wondering where I left that very useful screw driver, or maybe it's time to check that pipe that runs so close to the outside wall—it has been pretty cold lately. And out of six hammers, one is just right for my hand.
 
I suppose the major change is what happens when there's more time of a different sort. There's less focus because there's no time crunch; the mind wanders and bumps into unexpected thoughts. I'm at the stage of thinking I meant to try that, to spend more time there. I have more time and I have less time. The result is less fiction and more photography—and yet it's all narrative.
 
This is an ongoing transit. I use the word transit because transition seems to imply an end point, and I'm not convinced there is one. Instead, I seem to be on a spiraling upward or sideways or somewhere, changing and discovering and trying things out. There will be more to report, but this is enough for now.
 
 
 
 

A few weeks ago I tried to get into my late husband's laptop. I thought I was thinking ahead to tax season and it would be a good idea to see what might be in there that I'd need. Instead of taking a leap forward, I took a huge one backwards. Somehow I managed to lock the laptop. This has led to various complications and now I find myself changing my email, scanning old files, and wondering when I'll get back to my current writing project.

Almost exactly a year ago I began this story about a social worker whose traumatic event of her teen years comes back to haunt her and the community. The story flowed from a photograph I saw once, back in the 1970s or possibly earlier, of a number of organized crime figures leaving a motel early in the morning, possibly after a meeting or perhaps just a friendly all-night poker game. (Do they even have those?) The image lingered, the story developed, and I began writing.

Caring for my husband on hospice took over my life, and though I finished the ms, it wasn't really finished. My agent kindly read it and made numerous suggestions, and now it sits in front of me. This is what I expected to be doing this fall, but with the problems with my late husband's computer and the overflow into mine, I'm wondering when I'll ever get to it. Fortunately, the story has remained warm, and even has grown while I've been coping with other things.

So this fall, as the leaves turn gold and red, I'll clear my desk of the pesky details of real life and sink into a world of danger and death, which is preferable to lost emails, locked laptops, and the upcoming tax season.