He was always cold

Fleece-lined pajama pants

I finally turned the heat on a week or so ago. Night time temperatures were dropping into the 40s so it would be around 59 degrees downstairs when I woke up. I turned the heat on to bring the temperature up to 65 and then turned it off.

After the transplant Randy was always cold. It used to frustrate me because his way of solving the problem was to just keep cranking the heat up. And that wasn’t really practical, for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that if the temperature was comfortable for him in one room I was sweating in another room. So I started suggesting things to help him warm up: take a hot shower, go up and down the stairs a few times, wear layers of clothes. But he didn’t want to do any of those things - he wanted to either turn up the heat or complain about how cold he was.

He was an incredibly inflexible creature of habit. In day-to-day life he was much more likely to try a new thing or to do something just for the heck of it or listen to new. music than I am. But just try to get him to sit in a different spot on the sofa or at the dining room table or wear a sweater over a long sleeved shirt. NO! That’s not comfortable. And I would posit that unfamiliar is not necessarily uncomfortable - it’s just unusual. Maybe you’ll get used to it.

So I bought him long underwear (he didn’t like the way they felt against his pants but he wore them), hooded fleece things to wear while he watched TV (it got in the way when he went in the kitchen), fleece-lined flannel pants (these were acceptable but ugly), an electric fleece poncho with a removable plug, and shearling throw blankets.

He looked like an old man dressed for a snow storm and it was depressing. I hated to see this guy who had loved a smart sports jacket with matching tie and pocket square looking like an emaciated Grizzly Adams. Within a week of his death I gave his blanket away and threw out all the other old man things - they just made me sad and seeing them made it harder for me to remember how he looked before he got sick.