My partner is still alive, and is feeling better. She still eats very little, but seems to enjoy food more than she had been. She is more alert. I can have conversations with her. There was a low point when she refused to eat for almost 24 hours and then slept through the Tonys (something we always loved to watch together), but she is better now.
She had a wonderful 83rd birthday. In total, 5 people showed up on different days, one with decorations. She is smiling in all the pictures (I am not comfortable posting one here, although I did post some on Facebook, because the person who took them posted them on her Facebook page).
In a funny way I think I may be happier than I have been in almost a decade. First, knowing, unambivalently, that my main purpose now is to make the end of a loved one's life happy, I no longer excoriate myself for not having a career or looking for a more interesting and stimulating livelihood. Qualifying for Social Security helped also. If I am "retired" the focus is less on what I do or did for a living. And I don't have to feel resentful that I don't travel. I just can't do that right now. I don't have to apologize to the universe for it.
I am still singing, and am singing well. Sometimes sounds come out that leave me stupefied as in "is that really me??" Of course what I always wished for most of all wasn't just to sing well, but to have the sort of diversified existence that one has when one excels at something, particularly in the arts or academia, which leads to travel, public engagements (performing or speaking), meeting new people, costumes, and the unexpected.
I still regret the past. Saying I "shouldn't" is really not helpful. When I say regret what I mean is that almost anything I don't like about my life (that I might have had control over at some point) can be tracked back to bad choices I made beginning in high school. I am learning that there really were people, even people who were adolescents during that train wreck of an era 1964-1972 who did the right things. I met a woman recently who mentioned how much she enjoyed going to the World's Fair in 1964. She was there with a school choir. I remember my mother dragging me there and my being bored witless and cranky about all the mountains of food everywhere when I was trying to diet. That was the state I was in 99% of the time during adolescence, wherever I was, so I generally preferred staying home. Now I am, I guess, "serving a sentence" at home as a freelance copyeditor. I didn't appreciate chances to have a wider life when they were offered and available for the taking, so I didn't get to have one.
Yesterday was Pride Day. How different things are now. We are less of a subculture (life is less titillating and hush hush) but we are also less angry, even with all the collective societal anger at Trump and what the Republican Party is doing to this country. I meet lots of Lesbians now who are what I would call "wholesome". They are not in the closet but they look nice and are comfortable around men. If I were 25 now I doubt anyone would be telling me that I shouldn't "invest my energy in a patriarchal art form like opera". Through chance Googling I found out that one of the young singers who sang with the choir, whom I was envious of, is gay! She just got married. She is a pretty coloratura soprano.
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