My Life 3.0

One of the curses of being GenX is that I often visualize my life through movie scenes. There is a scene in Heathers where the Dad is telling the entire funeral that he loves his dead gay son. For whatever reason this is the scene I think of when I think about being overwhelmed by grief. I am scared to death I am going to allow my own grief to become my personality. I’ve seen it happen too often, where memorialization of a dead loved one… becomes the driving purpose. I see that my blog has largely become me working through my feelings about what has happened… and am scared that I am starting to do the same thing. I also see the fact that I had a weekend where nothing much happened, because I lacked any drive to do things. Nothing really brings me any semblance of joy, so I kind of feel like I am just checking off boxes and doing the things that have to be done… until I can go back to sleep again where I blissfully am free of both grief and the need to think about anything. All of this said… I also feel overwhelmingly guilty that I am even attempting to move on with my life. Today is going to be my first day back at work, and on some level I am looking forward to having something to distract me from the pain. However I wonder if I deserve to be distracted. This is not even two weeks old at this point… and I am just not sure how to exist in the world. I feel like my attempts to keep moving forward, are somehow an affront to the importance of the pain that I am experiencing. Everyone needs me to be this person who is feeling everything in the same way as they are… and I am not even sure entirely what I am feeling. I think on some level there are parts of me that have gone numb as a defense mechanism because the pain was just too much. The cats need me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding them and loving on them… and my body needs me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding it… and now my workplace needs me to function enough to be able to resume my job. The only way I know how to do all of these things… is to disconnect my brain from my heart… and just sort of do what needs to be done. The thing that is killing me right now… is that I am having hallucinations. That is honestly too strong of a word for it, because it isn’t like I am seeing things in the world, but more that I am experiencing brief after images. Like for example I keep thinking she is in bed with me. I will turn over and swear she is beside me… only to realize that I am not hitting anything but empty space. Last night I had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to go down and check on her… which is a thing that I would often do after a few hours in my office. In fact that is the entire reason why I went downstairs on the night she died, was just that I had been by myself for awhile and figured I should check to see if she was okay. There are these burnt in pathways in my brain, and I swear I keep feeling like I am seeing the hazy afterimage of her still there… only to realize that it is just my expectations working against me. The only thing I can relate it to is the discussion of phantom limb syndrome, but in this case I am walking into a room certain that someone else will be there… but they are not. I know this is just the built up impulses after twenty six years in the same house… but this honestly is the thing I am struggling with the most.

Right now I am distracting myself with Path of Exile, Movies, and YouTube Videos. It isn’t so much that I am enjoying playing Path of Exile, but more that it is a familiar pattern that does not require too much of me. It is a thing I can do… that does not require me to spend too much time thinking about the situation I am going through. The thing is… I am getting zero joy out of it, but I am also getting no joy out of pretty much anything I do. I put in a request to our “Employee Assistance Program”, which I still feel like is a weird name for mental health assistance… and I am hooping that I hear something back. I am not sure how this process works, but I am hoping at a minimum that they can refer me to someone… preferably online so that I don’t have to deal with going into an office. Everyone wants to help me… but I am not sure what I need, or even how to explain what I am going through. I feel so fundamentally broken right now, and I am not sure what is even broken to begin trying to resolve this. I know this is just part and parcel of grief and loss… but I don’t want it to override what is left of my personality. Then again… I am still not even sure who the hell I am without my wife.

I’ve also been back in Guild Wars 2 some, largely because it is a good task based structure that I can focus on. It asks me to do certain things every day, and doing those… pushes me closer to some goal. I should in theory be cleaning out closets and preparing things to donate… but that is all too fucking heavy right now. I should really actually be working on thank you cards… but I am not even sure where the fuck to begin with that. I need to talk to the person who is working on setting up the scholarship fund and figure out what they need from me for that as well. There are a ton of donations coming in through the Church and they want somewhere to put that money. I recorded and edited AggroChat this weekend and also edited the church sermon… so that was some semblance of normal. I had to figure out how to get onto my wife’s facebook account so that I could grant myself access to the church facebook… because there were a bunch of things that she took care of after I had posted everything. However I think I more or less have a gameplan going forward, and next weekend I should be able to generate the powerpoint that she used to do for the church digital display that we bought. Then there is the duality of people reaching out. On one hand I appreciate it greatly, because it is keeping me from falling too far into isolation. However on the other hand I am a massive introvert bordering on a hermit… and I just want people to stop intruding on my life. It feels like I am sitting in the living room floor, trying to rebuild a castle out of blocks… and then when someone forces their way into said living room… it all gets knocked asunder and I have to accommodate another human being inside my head for a bit. I can’t just be “chill” about other people in my space. That is not the default state of my existence. My wife and I pretty much spent countless hours with it being only the two of us in the house, and anything other than that just feels fucking weird. On some level I feel like I need time to acclimatize to it only being me… and I can’t really do that if people keep interjecting themselves. Like someone from the church brought food by yesterday… and it was very sweet of them… but it forced me to suddenly have to deal with not only a stranger existing in my world… but now trying to file away food for future use that I was not prepared for. Like on one hand I just want to lock everyone out of my life until I am “better”, but I also have no clue when that will be… or if I will ever reach that point. Human beings doing human being things… stress me the fuck out. For most people… humans are comforting… for me… they are just chaotic variables in the equation of my life that I don’t quite know how to account for. All of this continues tweaking my fear that my personality is becoming one of grief and loss… and I will never be myself again. I am not saying don’t reach out and check on me… just do it in a way where my participation is optional. I love the people who text me, because that is something that I can answer at my leisure when I am up to it. I detest the people who call me… because it requires me to spackle over the gaping holes and force myself to be mentally well enough to have a conversation. The cardinal sin however is when folks show up at my doorstep unannounced because so much of me wants to hiss at them like a startled cat and run away into the darkness never to be seen again. I am dreading going into the office tomorrow. I have a new employee starting and I need to be functional. I am not functional. I especially hate the thought of being forced into conversations by people who I have not been face to face with for roughly five years. I expect to bail early on the day, or at least as early as I can. I have no fucking clue how to do any of this. I just want the world to pause until I am well enough to exist in it. The post Grief As A Personality appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Morning folks. I had the first decent un-medicated sleep I have had since this all began. I know I fell asleep shortly after the 10pm evening news started, but since I remember nothing about the broadcast… I am guessing it was really quickly. I was woken by my bladder alarm around 4:30 at which point I snuggled with the cats until 5:30 when I finally got out of bed and showered. Yesterday was the funeral and I survived it, and today is the first day that I do not have an itinerary. I feel like today is probably going to be the hardest since I don’t really have much of anything to distract me. Knowing this… and knowing I would need all the support I could get… I got up and went to the “fancy” donut place and got a cronut and a sausage roll to bolster me as I star this day. I am sure I will have people checking in on me today… but really this is the point where my next life truly begins. Yesterday I decided to categorize the post as “My Life 3.0” because really… that is what it feels like is happening. My first life was before I met my wife of almost thirty years… at that point another life began and it was a great life. Now I am beginning a third life and I have no clue what the future holds. When my brother-in-law lost his wife of an almost similar scope… he went off the deep end, and I now understand why he did more than I ever thought I would. He has reached out several times to act as someone to talk to since he has been exactly where I am now. My wife’s sister was the glue to not only that family… but our entire family as a whole… and everything was just different after that point. I’ve already made plans with our friend to go spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s mom this year because generally speaking it was only my wife that would be there. We had gotten in the lazy habit of what we called “divide and conquer” where I went to my folks for Holidays and she went to her mom knowing she would be the only person there. It allowed us to spend the entire day with the respective parents, but in truth… we probably should have been just making it work so we saw both sides. I know I am going to have to step up and be there for her mom and I have already let my parents know that they are going to have to start sharing me on the holidays again. Her dad and step mom were often just calls that we made, but I know I too will have to start visiting them as well. I am expecting that I will be held onto by many in her family… because I am the last vestige of the person that they knew and loved. It was almost thirty years that we had been together, attending the same family gatherings… so it makes sense. I was as much of a fixture as she was. So one of the things that my wife and one of her good friends did regularly… was attend the funerals of folks in their church… and then critique what went wrong on the drive back. In this light… the funeral was a horrible mess… but that was honestly sort of perfect because my wife would have been cracking up the entire time. First off it was extremely well attended. I was in too much of a fugue state to really grasp the scope… but my friend who attended estimated there were 300-400 people. Essentially it was in a high school gymnasium that had three sides for seating. The family was in the floor and there were over 100 of us there… and then two of the three seating areas looked to be fairly full. I know from my office along just being there for me… there were like a dozen people. Pretty much everyone that I met with was crying as well, or had been… so I guess the service was meaningful. Basically I had spent so much time planning… only to hand it over to folks who had no clue what they were doing. Essentially the flow of the service was supposed to be a bunch of blocks where there was a sermon delivered by the pastor and then a musical break where a slide show played. Then another sermon break, and then the slide show would pick up again as another part of the photo slide show played. There were roughly 120 images in the slide show… and I will be charged like $150 for this video to be created… which is something that I could have done trivially and have done before. Essentially… the entire time the service was going on, a windows 11 desktop was being broadcast to a screen… with all of the lights on, so you could barely see what was going on. They eventually realized they should probably dim the lights… but that only happened after the first musical interlude. They played the wrong songs at the wrong time… realized their error and then played the right song. There was a point where they were supposed to play a video, but somehow played the wrong video. Then when that video finished… they played the same video a second time only realizing it was a dupe after probably 3 minutes. Then clearly getting discombobulated by all of this… they started the slide show over again from the beginning rather than picking up where they had left off. Basically… nothing went according to plan, but I am not sure how many people in attendance actually realized this or if it was just me who had painstakingly helped them plan and organize all of the media for this thing. Essentially I should have just made the videos for them… so I had one set of images synchronized to a song and then labelled all of the videos 1, 2, 3, 4, etc so that no one had to think. I would say I have learned my lesson… but also this is not exactly the sort of thing you get a do-over for. Everyone kept saying what a touching service it was… but all I could see were the glaring technical and execution errors. I tried… but someone without the rigor I would apply to the process was the one executing it. The part that was the worst however was the fact that the microphone that the pastor was using kept cutting out. Eventually they swapped mics… but not before someone from the venue had walked out onto the podium and fiddled with it three times. I was laughing from the floor… which prevented me from crying. I have worked in IT my entire life… so this honestly was fitting. I know if something CAN go wrong it often does. I just felt so awful that maybe I could have done something to make it work more smoothly… that if I had done their jobs for them… it would have gotten done right. I know my wife specifically had wanted her funeral done by this funeral home… because it is folks who go to her church. However that said… I will be planning my own funeral elsewhere for certain. I was too exhausted to be outraged honestly… and at this point it is done and behind me and nothing I can do can fix it… so all I can really do is laugh. The entire day yesterday is a blur. I hugged so many people… and I believe thankfully I was able to summon forth the correct name for each of them. It was a long day. I did not get home from the entire proceedings until around 5:30 pm, and at that point I was so past going. I took off all of my sweaty clothing… piled it in the washing machine and will be going down in a bit to start that. Every part of me ached… physically and emotionally. I eventually made it to the couch where Gracie snuggled with me so deeply that it soothed away all of the frustrations. Even thinking back upon that morning… it felt like it had happened days ago. The entirety of the day… felt like it spanned a week of time. So many things happened, so many people seen, and greeted… to give them the opportunity to carry on their own individual grieving process by offering condolences. I was told that I was loved so many times, and offered back my own love in earnest countless more times. Then also had folks checking on me throughout the night. I spent time hanging with my non-biological sister regaling them with the days events… only to have to bail because the neighbor down the street was at my door checking in. Her kids were delivering a gallon jug of Milo’s Sweet Tea and Milo’s Lemonade since we had a bunch of drinks left over, and I said that was the one thing that I would not mind having. I successfully dodged taking home all of the left overs, because I said that I would rather the church had a meal after services this Sunday in memory of her. I need to figure out how I am going to work the logistics of the sermon, because I still plan on editing it and maintaining their website. Basically my normal Sunday flow was to edit AggroChat and then when she got home from Church edit the Sermon, and I plan on keeping that rhythm. The irony of all of it is that I am very much not a religious person… but also knew how important it was to my wife, and I supported her in all endeavors. I think I am going to clean a bit today. The cats have continued to remove greenery and flowers from the arrangement that my good friend Cyl sent me, which also thankfully are the only flowers that I ended up taking home. The rest went to other family members who are more floral motivated. We did not have a ton of flowers because we were trying to redirect everyone to just donate to the church in lieu of sending them. My wife’s teacher partner in crime for years is also working on setting up a scholarship fund, and the church has already said that they planned on making a sizeable donation from the funds that were incoming. That isn’t exactly how I expected that money to be spent… but I am not going to argue with it. They spent the five years or so we did the podcast and website, trying to pay us for doing it. We kept refusing it, because we viewed it as just supporting the church with our actions. I still do not plan on accepting a dime from them going forward, because really… that is precisely what she wanted. Right now I think I am targeting maybe going back to work on Monday. I have a new employee starting this coming week, and if nothing else would like to be there for him. I still feel like I am completely unmoored, and maybe some of the regular features of a work schedule would help with that. Right now… I am just bone weary tired… so at least in the nearest interim I am going to rest. The last week took a lot out of me. If my math is correct, I unintentionally lost around twelve pounds. Starting tomorrow though I am probably going to begin getting up first thing in the morning and walking for a bit. I still want to travel more… and in order to do that… I want travel to be less physically painful for me. That means I need to figure out how to drop a bunch of weight so that I can maybe ride on a plane without feeling like it is going to break my legs. I am sorry if all of this is too raw… and if it seems weird that I am working through such private emotions in a public venue. My blog is more a dialog with myself than a dialog with the world. When I write it… it is essentially like I am talking to myself and then find it odd that anyone is actually reading it. I do however appreciate all of the support I have gotten both through this blog and through all of the other online methodology that exists for me. Yall have been amazing as I have struggled with this. The post The Quiet Begins appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

In the upstairs bathroom, there are two tiny windows in the room with the shower… and Josie loves them. She has long since stopped fitting into these windows but this does not stop her. She always looks so damned uncomfortable, but if there is ever a time when I cannot find her… I will find her in these windows especially as the sun streams through them. The quality of the photo is pretty shitty because I was using the digital zoom for fear that she would hop down when I came into the room. I love her, and I wish she was as snuggly as she was when she was a kitten, but I try and give her the space she needs. I am wondering how her personality is going to change… and honestly how the personalities of the other two girls are going to chance now that there is no momma and it is just daddy. Cats are effected in unpredictable ways by life changes. I am so exhausted at a soul deep level. I got something resembling normal sleep last night. I rush ordered a box of zzzquil and it was sitting on the front door step when I got home last night. So I indulged in that and slept pretty much from 9pm until 3:30 and then got up for the bladder alarm and took shorter naps from 3:30 until 5:30 when I officially crawled out of bed. All told I think the stuff worked pretty great and hopefully it can help me through this transition between sleep patterns not working, and normal sleep. Though the more I read up on it… it seems like it is essentially the same as my old trick of taking two benedryls. I knew I needed rest going into today and was willing to carve it out however I could get it. The problem with all of the methodology is that I never sleep the entire night when I am taking something to induce a sleepy state.

Yesterday was the viewing and I got over there around 10:30… saw my wife for the first time… had a mild freak out because she looks nothing like the woman I married. Realized a large part of this is because I had forgotten her glasses and then rushed back home to get a pair. This is what held me up for a bit as I had to wait on a bunch of geese to cross the road. There are around 15ish of them that frequent the small ponds in our neighborhood and they feel like they own the town. So essentially all traffic stopped while we waited on them to cross… at which point I could scramble through the house trying to decide which glasses to grab. She had so many pairs, because she essentially two strengths… readers and then normal progressives and kept them pretty much everywhere she might need to make the transition between the two. I grabbed a brand new pair she had picked out but never really started wearing. Figured she might as well get to wear them, and they also complimented her. So when I say she looks nothing like my wife. The funeral home did their best, but they had been working on her for an hour without any luck… pumping air into her lungs without any air escaping, and it was just obvious that she had a very rough time. I personally think she died in the driveway of my house and was gone from that moment forward, and all of the trip to the hospital emergency room… was just in vain. On some level seeing her like that helped me more than I realized, because it allowed me to draw this line in the sand that she is no longer there in any form. That she had been gone for a very long time. They nailed her hair though, and I give them mad props for that. The funeral home tried really hard, but when a body has had a traumatic last moments… it shows, and she looks exceptionally rough. I tried to give some of the people she was especially close to a bit of a warning that she as going to look rough. That was probably the hardest thing about yesterday. I was friends with most of the people who cared about my wife the most from the teaching community. Many of which I have been in text messages off and on since the event happened. Seeing them dealing with the levels of pain I dealt with in those first few days was so hard. All I wanted to do was take the pain away from them and protect them from the feelings I knew all too well. I gave so many hugs, and they were big and lasting and I let so many of my wife’s friends pour tears into my shoulder. I joined most of them in tears, but I had the benefit of this being way more real for me than it had been for them. I watched my wife dying, and I saw her husk sitting on a gurney in the emergency room. They had not seen her… so within moments the battering ram of crushing grief claimed them… and all I wanted to do was lessen their pain. The day was more physical exhausting than anything, because I kept trying to give time and attention to everyone that showed up for us. I just kept flipping between groups of people as they came in, because everyone wanted face time with me to offer their heartfelt condolences. I shifted into host mode, and while I broke down several times… the action of trying to make everyone understand that they were appreciated kept my mind busy. Everyone was worried about me, but I was way more worried about all of them. The few of us that were in the emergency room that night, had already been through the phases that they were going through. It isn’t easy… I am still very much not okay… but yesterday made me realize how much more okay I am than I was. My friend Vid introduced me to the Ball in a Box metaphor for grief… and I don’t necessarily think that my ball has shrunk yet…. but I do think the momentum has slowed. All of that said… all bets are off for today. Today is the funeral, family luncheon, and then graveside portion and will similarly consume all day. I left the house around 10 am yesterday and other than the frantic rush back for glasses… I did not make it back home until almost 8 pm. At which point I pretty much scarfed some food that a neighbor had brought me the day before and then collapsed into bed while being swarmed by cats since I was not around all day. Today is going to be exceptionally hard, and I am probably going to go with the more comfortable of the clothing options I was thinking about… because I know it is going to be a long hard day. It was also sweltering yesterday… before the sun heated up the funeral home it was actually somewhat chilly but in the depths of the 90 degree day… I was a mess. The nice shirt that I was going to wear today is a light color, and I am absolutely going to spend the entire time sweating through it. So I feel like I probably need a darker color to at least diminish the impact. While I wonder what changes my cats are going to go through… I also wonder what changes I am going to go through. I’ve always been a secret hugger, but been to self conscious and awkward to regularly engage in them. Yesterday I hugged so many people and it just became my most natural form of self expression. There was a student that my wife had recently taken under her wing, and I have been texting back and forth with her because I knew she was going to take this exceptionally hard. Shelli had become a bit of a surrogate mother to her over the last few years since she had graduated, because she needed someone like that in her life. Yesterday she told me “i felt a piece of her when i hugged you it truly felt so calming for the first time since this all happened.” and that made me very thankful that I cast aside those self conscious tendencies and just gave into the hugs. Maybe I change through this. Maybe I become less conscious about who I am and the space that I take up in the world. I am a giant… and I have always been trying to take up less space. I move my way through life like I am just about to upset the balance and knock everything over. Maybe I accept the fact that I will never take up less space in the world and give into being the person that I actually wish I could be. If you are still reading I thank you for coming along on this journey. The post Aggressive Hugging appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.