I had the pleasure of watching the movie “Pleasantville” tonight, and enjoyed the delightful irony and illumination that the movie offers for our times. As the characters step into their own shadow, color fills the space. At first, it’s the light: knowledge, affection, love. Then it’s lust, violence, anger, and finally love again. Such beautiful symmetry…it all ends up in love. Just like our ephemeral lives, at the end all that matters is love.
At the same time, I had the pleasure of trading comments on Facebook with my stepmom about Roe vs. Wade, the landmark abortion decision by the Supreme Court forty years ago today. I fully support abortion, and have had the painful experience of sharing the procedure on two occasions. Abortion is violent, and as such, I wonder if it is contrary to my Buddhist vow against taking life. But the question is really about “what is it to take a life”? A reading of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” provides some information, as there is a whole section in the book about choosing your incarnation, seeing the birth canal, and deciding that this life is not the one to choose, to resist the incarnation and not emerge. Clearly, the Tibetans feel that life begins when we pop out of our mother.
This week, we saw the inauguration of President Obama, and heard his speech, bringing a vision of our country with equality for women and different races, marriage for same-sex couples, support for the poor and impoverished. In a very real sense, the battle of the forces in “Pleasantville” reflects the split in our own society and political system. May we all find our way back to the place where our love of each other is more important than our differences of opinion.
And I fervently hope we find our way to live together in a full-color world, with lots of immigrants, women running things, gay couples, abortion, etc. We will. It’s inevitable, like the march of color through the movie.
I’ve been continuing to reflect on the last year, re-reading my blog postings from a year ago as Nancy and I navigated her hospitalization. Early last December, we realized that she would not survive, and a year ago this afternoon, she decided to stop medical treatment. She passed away early the following morning, so tomorrow will be one year. I’ve also gone back and read my private journal entries, where I wrote about my feelings through this period, the events of her final day, the long vigil that Tina Benson, her brother Jim, her sister-in-law Kathy and I shared through the night. Someday perhaps I will get this into a book, but for now, there is no need to share details. It’s enough for me to simply remember her, and feel the still-healing place in my heart.
So the next 24 hours of my life are ritual space, and I invite you to join me in whatever way you wish. As we celebrate the winter solstice, and the death and rebirth it symbolizes, remember who she was to you, what she brought to you, cherish her. And perhaps ask yourself what was born in you at the time she passed away?
For me, everything inside seems to be different. The boot-camp of nearly two months in the ICU developed some essential durability inside; I know that I can sit with anyone through just about anything now. I also know just how fiercely loyal I am…I never even thought about leaving her side through all of this (although we were working hard on our marriage before her final illness came in).
The daily contact I had with her, for weeks after she passed away, was loving and communicative and startlingly real for me. It was like having her sitting next to me, invisible and a little hard to hear clearly. It got to be pretty amusing, I would be driving to work, and she would land in the passenger seat and surprise me, stick around a chat for a while, then take off. I had additional contact with her last April, for several weeks. I now know that some part of us continues after we pass away, and that unshakeable knowing has stripped away most of my fear of my own death. With that, many of my other habitual fears have fallen away. If I have a feeling, I don’t hesitate to express it. If I have an observation to share with someone dear to me, I don’t hesitate to express that either…as long as what I say is in service to them and to our relationship. I had so many little stopping points, ways of filtering myself, before Nancy died, too afraid to speak the plain truth, afraid of my impact or of the judgement or criticism that might come back. Now I hardly ever filter myself. Life is too short for superficialities.
I also have a sharp and deep appreciation for all that I sense and experience. I’m loving food, wine, weather, hugs, everything sensory in huge ways, and I’m greedy for it all. Life is precious and fleeting, and we won’t get to have these experiences when we’re gone, it will be different.
Which begs the question, what do we get to take with us when we die? I can testify that Nancy had all her memories and feelings, in fact, her ability to express love and feel loved was liberated when she left her body. So we get to take our love with us. Perhaps that is the durable remains of incarnation, the part we get to keep always. The ngöndrö practice text says
The passage of the four seasons is but a momentary flicker. Everything is impermanent, bound to four inevitable ends. There is no one who, having been born, has not died. Our lifespan and life force are like a flash of lightening or a drop of dew.
I would have never taken on the preliminary practices before losing Nancy, and now there is a spiritual anchor in my life through them. They are changing my body, strengthening me physically and changing me in subtle ways I can feel, but not yet comprehend. Some of my meditations are bringing intense insight, delightful awareness, deeper feelings, more receptivity. This is all wonderful.
And lastly, I adore the woman I’m dating, I revel in the direct and affectionate and uncommitted relationship we have, and we are about to go on vacation in Hawaii through the holidays, my real first vacation since the summer of 2009. I’m looking forward to what the new year will bring.
I sincerely hope that you, my friends, are finding love and connection, meaning and warmth this holiday season. I love you.
Since late October, I’ve been re-living the same time last year, the final fifty-six days of Nancy’s life, in the ICU at UCSF. When I went through the experience, I just had to show up each day, fully present, in the parts of me that could function while seeing my beloved on full life support, completely self-aware. Now I’m remembering the horror of it, how I had to negotiate with all my internal scared and young parts that could not deal with the challenge, tucking them away safely before walking into the hospital. It was the most difficult period in my life.
December 4th was the day that we found out that Nancy’s spinal abscess had returned, and that it could not be operated on. It was a decisive day, we all knew somewhere in our hearts that she would not recover without some kind of miracle. I wrote:
We are now facing the biggest mountain of all. Her two-month infection has turned into an abscess that seems to span most of her cervical and thoracic vertebrae, half of her back. It’s inoperable, it’s too big. Medical treatment is limited. The team of doctors switched antibiotics Friday, to meropenem and vancomycin, the big guns. The immunosuppressive drugs that prevent graft/host disease are dialed down to minimums, tachrolimus is below the therapeutic level, and prednisone is down to 10mg today. They will reduce the prednisone again in a day or two, but 5mg is pretty much the minimum to avoid an adrenal system crash that would also cripple her immune system. It’s a tightrope. Her immune system must rally to beat this.
The odds of Nancy beating this are not good. Nancy doesn’t want to die, she’s scared, I’m scared, and we’re digging deep. Her brother, sister and I all had extensive talks with her ICU attending and oncology attending today, and we’re putting together a meeting in a couple of days with the whole team.
That being said, some other parts of the journey are going well, and I believe in the power of all of our intention and prayer. There are a lot of us petitioning for her recovery, I’m giving her reiki each day, and lighting our altars each night. Her kidneys are working well, putting out something over four liters of urine each day. I didn’t even know they could do that. She’s been breathing on her own all day today, although she’ll get some breathing assistance tonight to help her rest. Her lungs have cleared of fluid, and she hasn’t been coughing up anything at all today. Her secondary inflection has cleared, and she has no more indication of any stomach problems. All her vital signs look good, though her pulse has been consistently high, around 100-105. She has almost no fever. She’s resting comfortably, and sleeping more than half the time since 3am this morning.
She’s sleeping now, in a quiet darkened room, as the chaos of the daily nursing shift change swirls outside. Mozart has been on the iPod player all day, as Janet, Jim and I take turns being with her. Her nephew Andrew and sister-in-law Kathy were here this morning also. As a side note, her dad came home from his week in the Novato hospital today, which helps ease the collective stress in the Jones clan.
Settle in, this is going to take days or weeks to resolve. I’ve learned that love is not a transient sensation of the body, love is a state of being, as durable as a galaxy.
As I approach the anniversary of her death, I’m contemplating all of what I have learned and developed because of her, and thinking about what I want to do on the anniversary to memorialize her, celebrate her, and release her. I’m also remembering all my love, encouragement, devotion, fear and pain.
Posted inNancy, Reflection|Comments Off on remembering the mozart wait
Welcome to my world, the practice room where I am (mostly) spending an hour each morning. Here is the view from my zafu (meditation cushion), as I begin. From foreground to the back, you are looking at: knee pads, a small rolled towel for my forehead as I prostrate, a small glass of almonds for keeping count (I move one when I complete each prayer, which is four prostrations for me), a Chenrezig thangka on the right (waiting for hanging) then the altar itself, with the prayer taped to the front. i have the prayer memorized, but I sometimes forget where I am, and need a reminder.
Ma nam kha dang nyam pei sem chen tam chae kyap kün dü kyi ngo wo la ma rin po che la kyap su chio
Yi dam khil khor gyi lha tsok nam la kyap su chio
Sang gyae chom den dae nam la kyap su chio
Dam pei chö nam la kyap su chio
Pak pei gen dün nam la kyap su chio
Pa wo khan dro chö kyong sung mai tsok ye she kyi chen dang den pa nam la kyap su chio
As I’ve entered into this first preliminary practice, I find that I have to learn it in stages. This first stage is learning how to fully prostrate, going from standing to outstretched on the floor, and back to standing without hurting myself. There are lots of little tips to make it easier…using a padded surface, knee pads, gloves to let your hands slide out, creating a smooth surface for your hands while padding supports your knees, hips, chest and forehead. Then there is memorizing the prayer, six stanzas of Tibetan. I’ve been listening to it and repeating it for weeks as I drive to work each morning, and now I have it well ingrained. A flow is happening as I chant and prostrate, it’s like a mild cardio workout. I break a sweat after five minutes. The third stage is to hold a complex visualization, involving buddhas, a host of enlightened beings, and my family and enemies. I’m working on that, and it’s happening in bursts.
The mechanics of chanting, prostrating and holding a visualization are getting easier, but I’ve hit the limit of what my body can do right now. In Bhutan or Tibet, these preliminary practices are taken on by young monks and nuns in their late teens, with strong, flexible bodies, and they complete hundreds or even a thousand each day. I’m in my fifties, and have found that my knees ache all day after eighty prostrations…so much so, that I’ve had to regroup, and do a different practice while my muscles and tendons recover. It’s fine, I’m patient, but I do feel a bit wistful that I’m not as young as I once was.
So I’m refining the first stage, getting coaching from friends with experience and yoga backgrounds, how to take the stress off my knees even more, how to rise gracefully using my core muscles. I have the second part mastered, the chant. The third part is coming together.
Now the hardest part is making this a daily practice. It’s hard to show up every morning, and I’ve never been good at integrating something physical into my daily schedule. I’m having to push myself to do this each day, and I still miss some. I’m up against the wall of my own desire and self-discipline, as well as my knees.
I’ve been living for many years in a multi-cat household, and it’s been a delightful part of my life. My first wife and I had several cats through our many years together, then Nancy and I got a pair of black kittens early in our relationship. Edwin P. Hubble and Subramanian Chandrasekhar, named for two famous astronomers (you can tell who chose the names!) When Chandra passed away last year, we got two more black kittens, creating a complex, three-cat dynamic. Kittens rolling and purring and clawing furniture, playful romping at 2am, sitting on the pillow staring us awake at 6am. It was fun and easy…as long as Nancy was home.
Then she wasn’t, and neither was I, visiting the hospital each day. The feline dynamic got messy, really it became a love triangle gone bad, with Hubble attacking the younger male daily. The short story is, the young one started marking territory, I had to clean up cat urine in odd places every day, and endure cat-fights in the middle of every night. Pheromone therapy didn’t fix it, three cat boxes didn’t fix it, enforced separation didn’t fix it, and I’ve had my bedroom door closed for months to keep the young one from peeing on the bed while I’ve tried to resolve this feline psychology mess. I’ve hit my limits.
So I surrendered the two young cats (now 17 months old) to the Marin Humane Society yesterday. They are bonded together, they are affectionate and entertaining, and if the evaluation of them is positive, they can find a new home together. I will be tracking their fate, they are dear to me, even as I had to let them go. The above photo shows them when they were four months old, a little over a year ago, just as Nancy and I were starting to make our relationship work really well, just before she went back into the hospital. It was a golden hopeful time, with everything going well for her and for us, just before it all fell apart.
Now the house is quiet, it’s just Hubble and me, as I’m cleaning up the last remnants of months of warfare and upset. There are some stained corners, claw damage on the couch, a little blood on the stair landing from the last grand cat fight. Enzyme cleaner is removing the last of the smell. Now there is only one cat box, now I can leave all the doors open, now the daily clean-up tasks are ended. Hubble seems happy to hang out in the closet like he used to, while coming out and interfering with me as I fold the laundry. Our bond is reaffirmed, and the peace is a huge relief.
How odd, that my life has whittled down to this. Eighteen months ago, there were five beings in this house, Nancy and I, two cats and my mom’s German Shepherd, Sheba. Now all are gone, except Hubble. The house now has an innate stillness that did not exist before. Except when Hubble plaintively whines for attention. He’s spending a lot of time alone now, as am I.
A hundred thousand repetitions of anything is daunting, when we look at the whole thing like a goal. There are a series of ‘things’ like this that I’ll be doing in the next few years, the preliminary practices, and I can really freak myself out by imagining the entirety of them, nearly a half million somethings. The first one is prostrations, while chanting a prayer and holding a visualization. As a scientist and engineer, it would be good to know what 100,000 feels like. But how the hell can my body bend down and flatten so many times?
It is even worse as I’m preparing to begin. Memorizing the prayer in Tibetan is hard. The syllables dance around in the back of my brain, out of order, like a stuck song. It’s like committing to hike over the Himalayas, standing at the base of the first 24,000-foot peak, wondering how I can make it over this, then endure the forty other peaks, the series of challenges to reach the goal.
(Hey, perhaps I will lose the 20 extra pounds I carry around my midriff! There’s a motivation!)
But the truth is, I’m not taking on a project as much as a change in lifestyle. From this point of view, I simply need to create a space where I can do my practice, and find some way to engage in it each day. It’s now more than three weeks since the opening weekend for the Sukhasiddhi Bodhi program, and I’m progressing steadily. Some of my fellow students have made major progress, some have done many thousands of prostrations already, some have done these preliminary practices before. But this is not a competition, this is a basic change in the way I look at the world, what is important to me. I simply need to set aside time each morning, and creating a beautiful place for practice is just one way of caring for myself, finding my own preferences, building what I desire.
So I’ve been moving forward, I have the prayer almost memorized, and I’m turning a bedroom into a practice room. The bedroom conversion is more of a project, as I’ve had to clear out many more bags of Nancy’s clothes, move in some furniture from her father’s house, install closet doors. This weekend, I should have my practice room, and it will be the first room I’ve designed and filled according to my own preferences in many years. It feels like a major step.
The photo is the empty bedroom, with my Buddha thangka, the new shoji closet doors, a Tibetan rug. By the end of this weekend, it will be my practice room, with an alter, statues, candles, incense, more thangkas, pillows and my zafu for sitting in meditation. And then the real work starts.
An unexpected evening alone at home, and I’m filling it. It’s so interesting to watch what I do, I’m pretty highly directed inside.
Give a co-worker a lift home to SF, with a little side tour of where I grew up
Pick up groceries, a roast, shiitake mushrooms and golden beets
Make my first stew of the season, messing up and cleaning up the kitchen
Work on memorizing a buddhist prayer
Balance three checking accounts, for my mother and myself
Pay bills in Canada, for things Nancy and I bought together
Put on a James Bond movie (“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”)
It’s just 9pm, and I’m getting ready to dine. Diana Rigg graces the screen in the background, one of my favorite actors. But it seems worth pausing, and looking at my last three hours. I’m loving the phenomena of my life.
In buddhism, phenomena are all the things that we experience and sense as incarnate beings. There is a lot written about this, for example, Steve Tibbetts says,
All objects that can be encountered or taken up by the mind are, while appearing clearly, devoid of inherent self or essence…. all phenomena, inner and outer, mental and physical, have no inherent essence or existence. They merely appear. The true nature of phenomena places them beyond the extremes of existence or non-existence. The true nature of phenomena is luminosity, selwa, the unity of appearance and emptiness.
Good to remember, since it’s all so pleasurable, and easy to get attached to. I feel so joyous cooking and eating a lovely stew, I’m happy watching the movie, keeping the paperwork together. I won’t die wishing I had seen more movies! But on the personal level, I’m having a delightfully sensory evening, with a sense of accomplishment.
Ah, the stew is excellent, with a touch of apple vinegar and red wine, the slight sweetness of the beets and carrots, sauce thickened by potato, fresh herbs, well-carmelized pieces of beef that I still consume with a blessing. The pleasure of taste and smell, after bringing my touch and sight and mind to the creation, is so full.
There is an urgency to what I do. I notice that I want to fill every moment of my life…I awake at night, and I meditate to soft presence. I have a few minutes while dinner sautés, and I move things up and down through the house. Even in this moment, I am hearing the first rain drops fall in months, and I think about what I might need to go running outside and take care of. Some part of me wants to cram every greedy moment full of aliveness, experience, presence, even as I contemplate the duality of “myself” and all of these activities and pleasures.
Oh, hell, I just remembered how this movie ends, Diana Rigg dies in his arms. Is that phenomena too? Is our mere existence, our incarnation, simply phenomena? I’m no longer present, wondering if I actually want to see the end of the film. Shall I watch it, and cry at the end? Thoughts pile on thoughts. The Diana Rigg I am watching no longer exists, as she is seventy-four years old. Do I feel sad about that?
I take a deep breath, and return to the present. It’s all just phenomena. All of it, even my grief. I relax back into the movie (or is that “my life”?) anticipating all my feelings as I watch. Phenomena are so delightful.
My new Buddhist practices begin with twenty days of contemplation, and two of the topics are the preciousness of human existence, and the impermanence of all phenomena.
“Ha!”, I think to myself, “I know all about this”. Loss has certainly cracked me open in both areas, I am now more present for the poetic and beautiful moments in my life than I was a year ago. So I begin to meditate on preciousness, and immediately realize that I’m screwed, and I have no choice but to sit in the loss, allowing it to flower to fullness. I’ve been good about following my feelings and grief, but it’s quite a different thing to sit and meditate on it, for an hour or longer. It seems somehow ironic that, after dutifully tending to this garden of tears for months, I’m now directed to spend hours and days sitting in the garden.
And it is a garden. At first, it’s hard for me to separate the two contemplations. I consider how precious my existence is, and within a few minutes I land in my feelings about Nancy. After swimming in loss for a while, my heart aching, I feel a surge of love and deep joy, that I get to be here, in this body. I love being alive, much more so because I’m acutely aware that I will end one day, at least, the incarnated “I”. Something will continue when I am gone. As I swing back and forth, empty and full, day after day, I become more and more aware of the preciousness of each moment, the vast gift of being alive. A tender, delicate place, like a baby oak coming up in the spring.
This is a different way of learning. The contemplation instructions are very specific, carefully worded and refined over 1500 years. They are simple, and land in my awareness like a seed. As I sit with the contemplations, they grow and deepen and flower into a very personal experience. Remarkable. I’m starting to see that the deep teachings are like this, just as meditation is a very personal gateway that cannot be taught, but must be cultivated within each of us.
Some moments are quite intense. Each morning, I drive to work past the Golden Gate National Cemetery, where my father-in-law Richard Jones was buried last February. From inside my practice, the view of more than a hundred thousand tombstones stuns me, perfect geometric array stretching into the distance. All these souls, their incarnations complete, leaving behind whatever joy and pain and love that they left, now reunited with the infinite. Most were WW II and Korean war veterans, had fired weapons in combat, known the fear and adrenaline and exhaustion of battle. My own father-in-law shot up dozens of Japanese trains and boats, downed several aircraft, as a P-40 pilot in China in 1943. All those lifetimes now gone, all that experience fading in our collective memories.
All that I am, all that I love, all that I’ve done will one day be gone. I remember how these thoughts would induce a kind of existential crisis in my younger self. Now it brings me here and now, reminding me that we are precious, I am precious, and each instant of my life is an opportunity for gratitude. Even visiting The Colonel’s grave today. Dick, we all love you, wherever you are.
We all recently passed the nine-month mark since Nancy’s passing. It’s damn spooky (or maybe just divinely perfect) that she died on the longest night of the year, and every change of seasons for the rest of my life will remind me of her. But there is something special about nine months. It’s our special, human period of gestation. I wonder how I’ve been gestating.
I have to start by saying that grief is still ongoing, I feel sadness several times a day. It’s not massive, the hole in my heart is healing, but there is still pain, my attachment to her was deep. Fog pours over the Marin headlands, and the beauty reminds me of Nancy, how we would delight in it together. Tears arrive. I drive in the fast lane to work, and I remember how she hated to be near railings, would ask me to move over toward the middle of the highway. Tears again. The reminders are endless and frequent, although now I just feel sad for a few minutes. I don’t have to pull over to the side of the road, racked by sobs any more. I wipe tears away, and move forward.
I also keep myself in my grieving, tracking my feelings by writing this blog. This is helping me to heal, I can feel it. I’ve just gone back and re-read parts of my blog after she passed, the night of her 49-day ritual, and my eyes are wet now. It’s all still tender.
…so empty. The white roses from tonight’s altar are on the table next to me, lovely and simple like the ritual Val Szymanski led tonight. Zen teaches the beauty of emptiness, and I can feel that through the memorial service, and through the loneliness of my silent home. The cooling fan in my laptop is the only sound, except when I click the keys to write this. Or sniff back my tears.
Brings me to a funny painful story. When I started riding my motorcycle to work again a few months ago (1+ hour commute to San Bruno), I found out quickly that it’s really hard to deal with a wave of grief while riding. At 70mph on the freeway, a wave hit me, and I made the mistake of opening my visor to wipe tears. Big error. The tears streaming down my face immediately splattered all over the inside of the helmet, like driving through a rainstorm without windshield wipers. I managed to pull over and compose myself without accident, before making my way home. I haven’t made that mistake twice 🙂
So, what is happening at nine months? A week ago, on the equinox, exactly nine months, I was in a weekend workshop on deepening spirituality. I believe that says it all. Right now, I’m in the middle of a four-day workshop at Sukhasiddhi. I’m beginning a two-year program of deeper buddhist practice, called ngöndro, the basic practices that relieve negative karma from past lives, and put our ego in right relationship to bring ourselves and all humans to enlightenment. In particular, I’m starting the preliminaries. The picture above shows the dedication at the beginning of the text.
This is a difficult learning, as hard as anything I’ve ever done. Holding a visualization, memorizing & reciting a Tibetan prayer, and doing a physical movement (prostrations) at the same time is challenging. Aaaand, we had a wonderful dharma talk last night about how this rewires the brain. These practices light up both sides of the brain and put them in relationship, so that cross-connection occurs. There is ample scientific evidence, researchers are doing MRI scans of monks in specific meditations, and wondering if the MRI equipment is broken. People who undertake these practices can make deep shifts in the way their bodies and minds work.
I will say this about the workshop. When forty people chant a prayer together, in that spacious and rhythmic way, as we did at Nancy’s 49-day ceremony, something wonderful happens. If you open to the sound, you can feel how the prayer rips through the space-time continuum. It’s like hearing the Gyuto Monks chant together. I’m spending four days in the beautiful and privileged place of doing this, moving this, hearing this.
I’m going in. Again. That is what is being birthed. I’m converting an empty bedroom in my home into a practice room. And I am trying to figure out how I can spend one to two hours each morning doing these practices. Now I’m up against my ego. Again. Will my attention go towards making this easy or difficult? Perhaps this will be both easy and challenging at the same time, and I just get to sit in that.
With all the hubbub about the new iPhone, I hate to feel like one of the herd and admit I’m getting one. But I am, it’s already ordered, and this will be my third iPhone. It’s a technology that has changed my life, and I am a big fan of Apple products, both the engineering and design.
Apple has had a huge impact on the technology industry, and on our lives in general. It’s an admirable company any way you look at it, and I have to laugh at all the pundits that complain about the similarity to prior generations, the new dock connector, the lack of (unproven) near-field communications, all the silly ways that people try to criticize the most remarkably successful product line in our lives. There is a very profound article that came out yesterday, written by the venerable M.G. Siegler, that I highly recommend. This is excellent depthful analysis and commentary. M.G., my hat is off to you, you are awesomely brilliant to reach in and find this insight.
I have two personal comments to make about the new iPhone. First, I observe that MANY of my friends (as well as myself) are coming off contract with their iPhone 3G’s and 4’s, and are intending to upgrade. There is a ton of pent-up demand, and this thing is gonna sell like hotcakes. I’m hanging onto my AAPL stock, which I fully expect to outperform the market for at least another six months.
But the deeper issue for me is about my carrier for more than a decade, AT&T. I’m deeply annoyed with them, and taking advantage of this new product to switch to Verizon. Many of my issues with AT&T are the same as others, frequent dropped calls and dead spots as I drive on major highways, no coverage at my house, very poor coverage up at our family cabin in Mill Creek, a crappy website that is slow and hard to use, long waits for tech support. They are a big company, and it shows. Like Lily Tomlin famously said nearly fifty years ago, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re the phone company!”
The tipping point came earlier this year after Nancy passed away. AT&T refused to waive the early termination fee for her mobile phone contract, and let me drop her phone number from our family plan. Their excuse was that “she was not the primary number on the family plan”.
This is just bad customer relations. I am happily dropping my mobile service with them, do not use them for internet or anything else, and will refuse to do business with them for the rest of my life. And I’m spreading the word. All my friends with Verizon are happy with their coverage, and AT&T does more for Verizon and Sprint marketing than they do for themselves.
In two weeks, when I get my new phone, when I find the service is acceptable, when I find I can use it at home (where a new Verizon cell tower is being built soon) I’ll happily be ending my AT&T account. And switching cell phone numbers from my old one to Nancy’s old number. It’s a little way to memorialize her, and memorialize the reason why I’m dumping AT&T after twenty five years of service (starting with Cellular One in 1986).
