Verizon and Kyle and Dylan and Me

This has been a tearful afternoon. It's a bit of a long story.

I pay most of my bills through a pay company that used to be called PayMyBills.com. Great name. Now, it's Paytrust. Is that supposed to inspire confidence?

Anyway. For some reason I can't get my Verizon bills paid via Paytrust. I follow the steps, make new passwords, go from Verizon back to Paytrust and back to Verizon. The links don't seem to work. And I don't spend that much time worrying about it, so I tend to wait a couple of months and pay my wireless bill when I start getting text messages and home phone recorded reminders. To make it worse, I actually have 2, count'em, 2 Verizon accounts: one for my wireless and one for my home phone and DSL. My home phone quality s****. My condo association is supposed to give us a new TV cable company which will have DSL and then hopefully I can trash Verizon completely (altho they do own the local area--I thought we'd put competition and free choice back into our telephone experience following the execution of Ma Bell). But I digress.

I've been avoiding other calls from Verizon. The ones that want me to re-up for a new contract. I had a 2 year contract for phones for Kyle and me. Together we had a family plan and 1400 minutes to share. We never used them all and it was a safe number considering the number of client, family, and friend calls I get and the tendency of Kyle to get a call over with quickly.

I did call last fall trying to change my phone situation, but I was reminded I have signed a contract thru January. I didn't have the strength to fight it, although I did have enough to passive-aggressively lay it on the Verizon Associate that since my son was dead it would be hard to use both phones and both lines. At which point I hung up.

Meanwhile, I had written down (in the blank book I carried up north in which I had written everything I needed to remember about hospital, donor, detective, mortuary, cemetery, and financial business--among other things) the numbers and times of Kyle's last calls, his last incoming and outgoing text messages, and so forth. There wasn't a lot stuff on this cell, because Kyle had lost his previous phone a few weeks before his death. In fact he'd had to get his numbers from me to make a new contact list and so didn't have many numbers put back in. He explained that now he only had the numbers of his very best friends, because if they hadn't called him, he didn't have their numbers to call them.

Even tho I had written down the phone information, I lived with a dread that I hadn't captured it all. I kept wanting to go through it all again, scroll every menu to try to get every bit of information about Kyle's last minutes and days, but I didn't seem or want to find the time. And I was damned if I was going to turn off the cell phone before I finished my search. Of course, I was thwarted by the fact that the cell phone stopped recharging. So it sits on my desk, enticing me with inaccessible secrets.

January passes and I still don't go to Verizon. I get calls about re-upping my contract. I ignore them. Why? I just don't want to cut off Kyle's account. I don't want his phone to be dead (although it is anyway). I've already cut off all kinds of things with his name on it. I just hate the finality of it.

But then comes the call that I need to pay the phone bill and I talk with Verizon and promise I'll do it by Monday and then Monday comes and goes and finally I'm at work in between things and think that I better not get my cell phone cut off--that's my livelihood--and so I go on line and find the phone number and make the call.

And a really lovely woman named April (check out today's date) helps me pay my bill. And I tell her about Kyle and of course cry too much but she is so sweet. And she helps me change my Plan so that I am not paying twice as much as I need to. And she reassures me that the chip in Kyle's phone will hold the information until I am ready to do something about it. Thank you April.

So that was part of the reason that the waterworks started. And continued. Another reason was that I've put in 40 extra hours in the past week on a project and haven't gotten much sleep. And a third reason was that I was listening to my shuffle and Bob Dylan's gravelly voice singing "He Was a Friend of Mine" in a mournful minor key:

he was a friend of mine,
he was a friend of mine,
every time i think about him now
lord, i just can't keep from cryin'
cause he was a friend of mine

And then other lyrics like: he died on the road . . . a thousand miles from home . . . he never harmed no one . . .

And then I just couldn't keep from cryin' either . . .

And I just was missing Kyle so much and feeling so sorry for myself and wanting to reach out for comfort (as I was editing the comfort and grief sections of the Psychological First Aid training manual!) but not really wanting to do it at the office. I knew I would get home and I would blog and my blog would absorb my grief and transform it into a neat contained pretty-type-faced entry. And I knew that by the time I was through, my tears would have dried.

So I'll catch up on sleep, put Ky's cell phone in a drawer, and stay away from Dylan for a bit. And keep on bloggin' Mama, bloggin' your blues away.

Bless you, my blog, and you, kind reader.