I go to visit Ailish’s grave about once a week. Often, but not always, on Fridays.

I am quite looking forward to the spring; the cemetery will install Ailish’s headstone, and I think we have chosen it with thought and love.

When I visit, I tend to walk around, counterclockwise, and often talk, sharing things from my week and expressing how much I miss Ailish. I was there on Wednesday and noticed that the grass has been worn down in a circle from my pacing.

The bus driver entered a plea yesterday. He plead not guilty to both charges against him. A trial was scheduled for June 11, 2012, two hundred and sixty three days later. Coincidentally, two hundred and sixty three days is how long I was married to Ailish, before the bus driver struck and killed her.

I have very little to say here. The bus driver received two charges against him: failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk; and careless driving. Considering that Ailish had the right of way, was in a marked crosswalk, and had a walk signal, being charged with only two traffic code violations already seems like a slap on the wrist. I am disappointed that he plead not guilty.

Dealing with estate issues requires patience.

Today, the bus driver was scheduled to appear in court to plead to his charges. I didn’t go to court; there was no point, his hearing was scheduled in front of a Justice of the Peace. In the late afternoon, I called to find out the results. Even with the docket number, there was much confusion. Eventually, after I had been on hold for almost fifteen minutes, the lady on the other end of the phone determined that the case had been further delayed until Wednesday. If I call back in 48 hours, they should be able to tell me what happened. Or maybe the case will be delayed further.

I finally received Ailish’s life insurance cheque, and deposited it today. That process required me to answer some rather invasive questioning from the bank clerk (“What did you sell to the City?”, “Was she a bicylist?”). The transaction also apparently required a bank manager and numerous telephone calls, as well as a detailed description concerning the hold placed on the newly deposited funds.

With that taken care of, I picked up supper from Tim Horton’s, only to have my debit card declined on a $9.51 transaction.

So, back to the bank. Now I have to explain to them how holds work on newly deposited funds. It turns out they had decided to place two holds on my chequing account, leaving my balance rather far in the red.

I’m not quite sure why everything must be so confusing, time-consuming, and difficult. I would have expected banks to regularly deal with cheques, or the court system to regularly deal with cases. But I really should not single out these two examples; pretty much every company I’ve dealt with in the past 145 days has been like this.

On weekend mornings, Ailish and I would cook breakfast. This requires two people.

I was responsible for the coffee and the eggs (poached medium, of course). And setting the table. Ailish was responsible for cooking the bacon (extra crispy), and pointing out all the things I had forgotten to put on the table when I set it. We’d handle our own toast. Me, because I liked having the toast ready and buttered for when the eggs were finished. Ailish, because she couldn’t stand cold toast and so had to time it to perfection.

It’s really quite difficult to get the timing down exactly. Coffee’s easy, of course. But bacon takes far longer to cook than eggs do to poach, so we had a whole system in place. I would set the table and then prepare the coffee. While Ailish started on the bacon, I would set up the egg poacher. Just before she flipped the second set of bacon, I’d plug in the egg poacher. Then, we’d put in the toast. Ailish would examine the table and point out all the things I had forgotten this time. Once that was corrected, the bacon would be finished, the toast would pop up, and the eggs would buzz. Breakfast would be perfect.

It just doesn’t work by myself.

Today is my birthday.

It is also four years since I started dating Ailish. You can read the story of how we started dating here. We actually started dating on the 2nd, but it was kind of early-morning on the 2nd.

I was remembering back to my birthday in 2007. I celebrated it at Ailish’s place. She cooked me dinner and what I particularly remember was desert. She had made a sort of porcupine out of various fruits, including a liberal amount of pineapple, which we had just been discussing via email. She also gave me some candies for a gift. :)

The porcupine, particularly, was wonderful and made me laugh. I think Ailish was a bit disappointed that I didn’t eat the whole thing, but it was a significant amount of fruit. She must have spent quite a while preparing it.

That was a great birthday, made better by us starting to date, officially, in the early hours of September 2nd, once I returned home.

Ailish and I had very different approaches to how fast one should drive.

On the highway, I believe you should pretty much go the speed limit. This used to drive Ailish absolutely crazy. I used to catch her looking at my speedometer and rolling her eyes. I’m pretty sure this is why she normally slept while I drove, just so she wouldn’t get annoyed. She thought the speed limit was a mere suggestion, and a rather stupid one at that. She did not drive recklessly, but she did not drive the speed limit.

On the other hand, I also managed to drive Ailish to distraction when in residential areas. There, too, I went the speed limit. Ailish thought this was dangerous and irresponsible, and that one should drive 30 Km/hr in neighbourhoods. She claimed this is what society demanded. I claimed if society wanted to demand that, they could do so by lowering the posted speed limit from 50 to 30. Ailish would just roll her eyes at me.

Today, I went down to court to file a Victim Impact Statement, and to try to determine if it was worth my while showing up tomorrow, the date of the bus driver’s court date. The result was utter confusion.

Normally, Victim Impact Statements are filed only in criminal cases. The bus driver has been charged under the Traffic Safety Act and is mandated to appear at the Provincial Traffic Court rather than Criminal Court. The lady I spoke to in traffic court clearly had never seen a victim impact statement before and was rather confused by my request to file it. Her supervisor also was unable to shed any light on the matter. She indicated that it would make no difference to the sentence as the penalties had already been set out. She asked what I hoped to accomplish and I stated that the bus driver killed my wife and I wanted to file a Victim Impact Statement. She clearly figured that I was not going to leave the court until they accepted my statement, so she (very reluctantly) did, and added it to the file.

I have little faith that the statement will ever actually be read into the record (or presented to the bus driver) if he is indeed found guilty. Section 3 of the Provincial Offences Procedure Act implies (to me) that they must accept and use the statement, but given the total confusion, I suspect it will conveniently be lost.

After much consultation with friends (thanks, D and J) and with information given to me by the court employee, I will not be attending court tomorrow. If there’s a trial, it almost certainly will not happen then. If he does plead guilty tomorrow, it would be in front of a Justice of the Peace, not in a real courtroom.

At this time, I do not want to publish the statement I wrote. However, I will point out that I had exactly two things I wanted to say when writing the statement:

1. Ailish was awesome; and
2. I really miss her.

Almost two years ago, Ailish convinced me to try jogging. This was a pretty monumental task because I hadn’t run at all since grade 10 in high school, and then only when forced. I was out of shape, hated sweating, and was rather dubious about the whole idea. And we had a wedding to plan.

Ailish, true to her nature, didn’t give a single minute of thought to any of that. Not only were we going to start jogging, but we were going to run a half marathon in the spring.

The first time out, I could hardly run one hundred metres without gasping for air. It took weeks until I could comfortably run five kilometres, and longer still to break 10. Focused as she was on the half-marathon, Ailish often decided it was a better plan to go out for dinner and a couple of drinks, and who was I to complain? Still, come April, 2010, Ailish, Siobhan (Ailish’s sister), and I, we all ran in the Edmonton Police Half Marathon. And we all finished. My time was 2:15:21.

After Ailish died, a year to the day after our first half marathon, I needed some reason to leave the house. My friend, Nicholas, convinced me to sign up for a training camp thing. So for the next sixteen weeks, I ran once again. I still hated every minute. I still don’t like sweating. I still think running is dubious. But once again, I ran a half marathon with my friends, Shane and Nicholas. My time was 2:07:45.

Note: It is possible that some of the information presented below is incorrect, though I think it is accurate.

The police have laid charges against the bus driver who hit and killed Ailish. He faces two counts under the Traffic Safety Act: failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk; and careless driving.

Together, these amount to ten demerits on his driver’s license. I believe criminal charges were not laid because the police (or the crown prosecutor) would need to demonstrate more than a momentary lapse in concentration and/or judgment. It still feels like an awfully small penalty to pay for taking Ailish’s life. But I guess he will have to live with what he’s done for the rest of his life.

There are always two sides to every story.

It is very clear to me when I write stories in this blog that I can only ever provide one side. And the joy of relationships is that there are always two points of view. I wish Ailish was still around so she could explain why she bothered with a slightly crazy, introverted, geeky boy like me. Or tell the stories she thought were important, which I’m sure would have been different from the ones I tell. All the little ways I drove her nuts, or the tricks I had learnt to calm her down. What parts of our relationship was she confident in, what parts still confused her?

All this, too, is lost.