The Slice

Birthday schmirthday

2026-07-27T02:02:24Z

Hey, Fiona. So you don’t need to make your dad’s death your new personality.

Blah blah blah. Don’t care. Here’s a story anyway.

So my mom likes to tell a story about my birthday that has basically had the same detail for all of my siblings: Mom went into labor, and my dad had to take a shower before they left. Didn’t matter how much pain she was in or the fact that we lived at least an hour away from the closest hospital and pretty much had to leave when she started having labor pains. He had to take a shower.

In my older sister’s case, she was almost born in an ambulance. In my case, I was born mere minutes after they got to the hospital. After hearing I was a girl like my older sister, my mom said he said, “Oh no, I have to pay for another wedding.”

Side note: Mine has been the only wedding of his four children as of this writing, by the way, and I absolutely had him pay for it.

Anyway, the moral of the story is supposed to be that my dad didn’t think of anyone but himself while my mom only thought of other people and sacrificed for everyone and all that I’ve heard my whole life.

And yeah, I get that perspective. I‘ve spent a lot of my life trying to put others before myself (and yet somehow also making it about myself in martyrdom, still working on that one) instead of just stopping for a second and admitting I need help or care or whatever I’m avoiding doing for myself at that moment.

In the course of my dad dying, I’ve rethought that narrative, especially through the lens of parenthood. One of the first things they say when you get on a plane when the masks drop down is to put your own mask on before assisting others. You need to make sure you’re receiving oxygen or you will be of no use to that small person you’re responsible for. It’s not that the little person doesn’t need oxygen. It’s that if you put their mask on first, they might lose you in the process. What are they going to need more in the long run?

For all the inconvenient times my dad stopped and did whatever he wanted to and took care of his own needs, maybe there’s a lesson in that too. He was on his way to the hospital to have a baby too. Was he actively having the baby? Of course not, but he was becoming a father again and again. There’s something to be said for being prepared for that responsibility in whatever way he did.

You’re never going to get the timing right. Life is complicated. Take the shower.

Low Grade

2026-06-29T17:42:09Z

The funeral service has passed. Dad’s celebration of life was yesterday. I still haven’t asked for the letter he wrote for me. My aunt asked how I was doing and if I have had time to reflect during the celebration yesterday, and I brushed it off saying life has to go on like I usually do with these sorts of things because it feels easier than being vulnerable.

Maybe that’s putting too tight of a bow on it.

I never feel like there’s time. If it’s not rumors at work about something that could happen, it’s that I have a six-year-old or there’s another holiday coming up that I should prepare for and make special even though underneath it all it’s still there. I thought the whole point of the last two years was pre-grieving, like maybe I could get this out of the way and then move on or something. Yet the thought of moving on at this point feels disrespectful too somehow. Really none of this makes any sense.

My intention on opening this entry was to add to it as I think of things during the course of cleaning I need to do, but it already feels like too much. I’ll try again later maybe.

Everything that dies along with it

2026-05-30T20:04:40Z

Things have been feeling more and more real the closer the actual service gets. It’s tough breaking through the veneer of okay-ness, and I already have a problem with caring too much about other people’s expectations of how I should be or act. Hell, my own expectations for myself have always been really high and strict. The should-haves or should-bes are difficult to fight against. Who I am actually underneath it all comes as a surprise even to me most of the time.

Enough navel gazing in that direction though.

I think there was always going to be a part of me that hoped that things would be resolved before he died, that there would be a grand reconciliation of needs versus reality. No matter how well I understood that about my dad and who he was as unchanging and unmovable, I also couldn’t help but secretly hope. Folks right now are very fond of saying that two things can be true at once: First that my dad wasn’t going to be anyone other than who he was the whole time I’d known him; and second that I didn’t get what I feel I needed out of the relationship.

Something about Hollywood and fairytales we tell ourselves for comfort when what’s in front of us is starkly different.

I can’t say that it was all terrible or abusive or anything like that, which is what makes it so hard to describe to other people. No one wants your complications if they don’t fit neatly in one box or another. It’s something you endure and work through in order to keep walking forward. You try not to make the same mistakes even though they end up feeling like the most natural thing in the world when it’s suddenly you who has to make the decisions. Sometimes the cycle you’re trying to break won’t make sense to anyone other than yourself.

Still, part of me mourns all the possibilities that died along with him. Before he died, it was at least something that could happen. A lot lived within that maybe. Now it’s gone for good, never to be realized.

A special flavor of disappointment that’s different for everyone.

There’s another part of me who worries I’ll forget everything in time. I feel like I’m already forgetting. The way he laughed. His side hugs. The nonchalant Love ya’s tacked on and foreign at the end of phone calls. The sound of his voice. The way he’d emphasize parts of names just a beat too long:

Hi, KAAA-tie. Fi-OOOH-na. MIII-chael. Sio-BAAA-hn. JEEA-nie.

I haven’t wanted to write down that last one because I knew I’d start crying, and here I am proving myself right. I mean, why wouldn’t I be right? Stuff like that is where the real hurt lives.

But I have my dress and shoes. I have the picture to sign and the memorial cards. I tested the iPad to make sure it’s going to record the service. I know when we need to get there on Monday. I have laundry to finish. It smells like cat pee somewhere in here, and I’m not sure where to clean to get that to stop.

People are already on their way. It’s all just going to have to be what it is at this point.

The Middle

2026-04-18T15:36:53Z

How do we celebrate the middle, time neither beginning nor ending but somewhere resembling progress. The incremental notch of a moment in the stream

We look back at moments enduring, the confirmation of a trend but not enough to seek help for the pattern. A fully realized entity, yet seen as mere plodding journey

Easy to say enjoy it while it lasts, to be more mindful, to find something to cling to while it’s here. Presence being the goal, not assigning importance but seeing what’s in front of you for what it is

Right now

Easier still to let it pass and, once slipped through your fingers, mourn.

Thursday

2024-11-08T04:19:12Z

As long as I’ve known him, my father has had a habit of making announcements. These are usually statements that someone else then has to make true, most of the time that someone else being my mother.

The car registration needs to be renewed.

The cats need to be fed.

I don’t need this anymore.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the man would make an announcement about his own death: I will die on a Thursday. I will be okay the Wednesday before but be dead the next day.

I can understand intellectually why he would say that. Some parts understanding that the calcium will eventually build up so much that it will overwhelm his system. (If not that, the rest of the cancer.) Some parts lifelong appreciation of symmetry. (He was born on a Thursday after all.) Some semblance of control over the narrative of the whole thing.

Beyond that, there have been hopes and goals: I want to vote one more time in person. I want to make it to see who gets elected. I want to wrap things up.

We look to the universe to see if it will make it so: Every Thursday I wonder if this is the day. If I will get a call. I know it’s superstition, and no one knows when, least of all him. Still I wonder. I text my mother to see how he’s doing and get little news. He admitted that he fell to the nurse. He’s accepted that he’s in pain and needs a little bit of morphine to ease it. He’s sleeping more and more.

The palliative care followup appointment that he scoffed at and said he wouldn’t make because he “wouldn’t live that long” has come and gone. The dust is settling on the election he wanted to see. Whenever we go to visit, he doesn’t have much to say other than he’s not very good company these days. He can’t hear my questions anyway. Still he continues on.

Now there is a new goal: To make it to Thanksgiving. Hearing a new goal after all this time of dreading the election and the results and that he might die right after no matter what happens manages to break me in half. I’m here staring down a deadline at work on November 20th. I have new employees coming that I will need to train. I have a beautiful child who needs so many things despite being so independent. I am needed elsewhere.

Life marches on, but I find myself looking down at my hands still wondering what the timing will be, if I’ve done enough, if there’s anything else I can even give that will prevent the pain that’s sure to come.

I know it’s going to hurt no matter what. I won’t know how much until it happens. I try to think through all the different timing issues, and none of it really matters either. The universe cares not for the plans I make. I don’t want him to die, but I don’t want… whatever this in between state is either. It feels wrong to say out loud, like I’m wishing for death to overcome my own small incomparable discomfort. I try to take it back, but it lies there anyway. Here I am anyway. Here I am struggling and trying to make poetry out of inevitable tragedy.

Another Thursday ends. I start waiting for next Thursday.

Smoke

2024-09-09T02:51:41Z

“And I feel just like I woke up in somebody else's skin
Who else is gonna remind you to take a picture of them?

Well, they brought hearts and daggers, they wrote songs about you
When they tied you up in the rungs of ladders
And you never ended up coming home, you just
Became something like some smoke that I tried too hard to hold”

“Smoke”-Brian Fallon

No one is ever going to be as good at raising your hopes as you are. Somehow those inflated hopes being dashed are the hardest to take. The lies you tell yourself to get through the day. The relationships you’re convinced are genuine with little to no evidence. The things you most believe are true until the actual truth is screaming in your face.

Gone and your heart broken, and no one really to blame but yourself for believing.

Faith is that thing you’re supposed to be blind to, at least religiously speaking. The only way we’ll take risks is to actually dive in without knowing if everything will work out or nothing at all. We won’t know if its worth it without trying, and trying means failing sometimes. We don’t know the outcome until it’s already done and there’s nothing we can undo. Fix? Sure, we can attempt to repair and move on, but undo what’s happened? No.

None of us ask to be born. None of us ask for the people we’re born to and among. The time and place is fixed. We meet other people and choose to have them in our lives or not. We cling to each other and are ripped apart.

And none of us are getting out of this alive.

I miss him, too.

2024-07-09T03:43:31Z

The other night, Johnny asked what he would do when we’re both gone. How would he learn new things? Where would he go?

I said I didn’t know but that there are a lot of places to still learn things. I told him he can look things up and find people who can teach him things and that he would still be able to figure things out.

He said that he would be 35 and go to the car museum. (Probably because we had just visited the car museum last weekend for something to do.) But he might not remember where it is when he’s that old, so he would draw a map to it. Then he would come back here, back home.

He asked what then would he do?

I said I don’t know but that he’d always be welcome here. He’d find his way. That’s what you do as an adult.

I think about all the times he plays with cars on his car mat his grandmother painted for his father. He asks if the cars are really loud as he vrooom oooms across the streets. He says he wants a loud car when he’s older, and it’s usually a Ford Ranger like his dad’s.

But for now, he’s only four. Any time we’re walking on the sidewalk, well, me walking and him riding his balance bike, he covers his ears no matter where he is when he hears a loud car coming. Motorcycles are the worst. I try to reassure him that it’s okay, that the loud noises startle me too and that they’ll pass, and then we keep walking.

He’ll sometimes pretend a baby is walking with his mom on the car mat and needs to cover his ears because of a loud car. Sometimes the cars aren’t too loud, and the baby is okay. Sometimes the baby is crying.

I know I can’t keep him here forever. He already runs faster than any of us and will eventually go out shining into the world with all our successes and mistakes intact. He will go out and make his own and maybe someday have that loud car that doesn’t make him want to cover his ears when he’s speeding down the street.

I hope it doesn’t break him. I hope I’m doing enough. I don’t know anything. There are no guarantees other than I won’t be here to see all of it. So much of life is fleeting and shorter in ways we don‘t want it to be. We fight over things that feel important at the time and stupid the next with enough time and space, and this is all meaningless if you don’t stop and see what’s in front of you every once in a while.

I hope he’s older than 35. I’m 40ish and looking at the possibility of losing my father. A not if but when situation, in the way that death comes for us all but sooner still than we are ready for. No matter the age or how much time you’ve had or really how close you are over the course of a lifetime. None of this is a surprise and yet you get to wonder what will take you first. Who will go first even. My mother turned and said to someone recently that it’s always the caregivers that go first.

What a comforting thought. My own granda died unexpectedly when I was ten or eleven. Unexpectedly because even though my dad’s parents were both pushing 80 at that point, my granny was the one who kept having strokes and was in and out of the hospital. I remember my dad coming into the living room and sitting down on the easy chair with his elbows on his knees. He had to be approaching 50 at that point. I asked him what was wrong, and after a bit in a very soft voice, I was the first one he told.

I remember my mother’s dad in the hospital, hooked up to endless tubes and oxygen. Laying there helpless, and somehow, at eight, I was the only one there to see him with my mom. I couldn’t hear violins for a long time without crying or set foot in a hospital without that dread seeping into my bones.

I could go on, about my granny years later not remembering who I was after another stroke years later in the hospital. Or how my Uncle John who our son is named after visited us after he had a resurgence of cancer and it was the last time we saw him before his open casket funeral, where they left a dab of shaving cream on his face and a bird flew into the church with his casket and didn’t leave until his casket did. Or any of the losses and how they would be six and five and five this year.

There are so many things that could happen, and I don’t know what any of them are or when they will happen. I don’t have control over them. I can’t fix them or make them anything other than what they are or will be.

We come back to a four-year-old’s questions. We do the best we can in the moment, even if the answers involve a future we don’t know. Trying to be honest even if the outlook is hazy. Covering our ears if the car is too loud. Just for a moment. Before it passes and is gone.

Seven Months Later

2023-07-31T04:00:48Z

I think in a previous life, I must have smoked. I look outside and feel wistfulness among the clouds and the setting sun, the light slowly dying into night as I inhale and exhale the only comfort left.

Either that or I just romanticize one of the vices I never tried, given that I have very few vices to exercise these days.

Where to begin? I am now forty. All my grandparents by blood and adoption are gone. Even the house where I grew up has been sold (undervalued and to folks who bought it on a whim, but that’s a long story for another day). I somehow made it through last session, somewhat kicking and screaming but with a bang and a whimper at the end. I continue to feel lost about what direction to head in and whether I’m suited for much of anything I’ve tasked myself with.

That is a somewhat purple way of saying I’m unsure of what I’m doing.

It simultaneously feels like I’m running out of time and wasting it. During session, my father’s doctors discovered he had cancer wrapped around his kidney. Doctors plural because it involved multiple systems. The only solution was quick surgery to remove the whole thing. I went to visit him with Johnny in case it was the last time we’d see him. He talked about his youth, about waking up and hearing land rails as a boy. How beautiful they were but how nasty their calls were. I held on to this in case it was the end.

It isn’t. They took his kidney, and his other kidney works well enough for both of them. He survived to deteriorate another day. Dementia is slow in a way that panic cannot grasp.

Meanwhile I attempt to face minor demons I don’t recognize until they are coming out of my own screaming mouth. I do these things without thinking then want to sob myself out of existence. The weird ghosts of the past long dead and thought buried. The idyllic childhood everyone knows is only as good as the buttons a small child somehow knows how to press. My coping mechanisms aren’t as sound as I always thought they were. I am even more insecure than I realized. I probably need therapy to sort some of this out, but who would understand? The longer I sit to think about it, the less inclined I feel to try, and this just brings me right back to where I started.

I’m still not any good at talking through these things in a way I don’t find instantly offensive or distasteful. Some of it is, in fact, offensive to begin with, but I suspect much of it is only abhorrent because I’ve conditioned myself to find it as such. Stay uncomfortable. Don’t say that out loud. Either no one cares or it will show everyone else just how bad of a person you are deep down inside. Nothing outside or in the middle. No higher ground or redemption possible. Just swallow it and be who you’re supposed to be.

Whatever that is.

I don’t know that I’m depressed so much as overwhelmed and tired all the time. I suppose these things aren’t mutually exclusive, but I keep my own depression at arm’s length these days. It’s everything else I can’t seem to manage, or so I tell myself. I want to be a good worker and supervisor and mother and wife and sister and child. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to do all of those things, at least not well. I am buried somewhere underneath.

But yes, yes. Where do I get the audacity? Who said I had any right to feel with every blessing I’ve been afforded? It doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t matter now.

Subconscious Grief

2022-11-21T00:07:47Z

I’m at your place. It’s not your place now, of course. Even in dreams, I know this. Still, we’re there to celebrate. The valley is all there. Remnants of your family and friends, some who moved away many years ago. Some I barely remember.

I sneak away and walk toward my parents’ house. It’s not my parents’ house anymore either, of course. I turn around and stare at your yellow house. I know those aren’t the yellow curtains I grew up with in the window. I cry because I know you’re both gone. Really gone. It’s all gone now.

I scream about how it’s all a joke and do my best to will my tears to go away.

A few folks sit down around me to socialize. I can’t think of a thing in the world I’d like to do less.

I exchange a few pleasantries then make some excuse about having to go back to work that no one believes. I am dismissed with disgust as I walk back to the house that’s not your house.

Hmm.

2022-06-06T12:50:12Z

You ever wake up way too early thinking about stupid shit you did in your twenties? Somehow, I still do. I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, but my twenties were an especially cringe part of my life. I’m not going to get into specific incidents because that doesn’t solve anything. (Besides that, if you’re thinking about any kind of specific event, it’s probably in this journal somewhere if you really want to find it.) I am sorry if you were ever on the receiving end of that idiocy, though. I did a lot of “taking responsibility” without backing it up with actions that would have actually fixed some of the problems I caused, and for not having a lot of self-esteem, I was pretty arrogant about myself and my abilities. (I’m still that way if it makes anyone feel any better, just older and toned down for the most part.) For being so high and mighty about a lot of things, I’m also a coward sometimes. I don’t write this to justify anything I did. I know I can’t go back and fix any of this shit. It’s just early, and I can’t sleep. I’m hoping that writing about it will release it from my brain because laying in bed awake sure wasn’t doing it, and my 2-year-old will be up soon.

Headspace Musings

2022-02-05T21:54:31Z

Part of why I wanted to start writing again has to do with my meditation practice (if you can even call it that). I use a pretty popular app called Headspace, and my current streak with them is over 2 years long now. I think I started with them right around the time of my second miscarriage, but it could have also been the first. (That timeline runs together due to all three losses happening in a little over a year, so it’s hard to recall exactly.)

Anyway, I’m not here to extol the virtues of meditation or Headspace or anything else like that. However, a fair amount of the meditations have helped me confront some of the beliefs I’ve long held since childhood as well as find a bit more peace with my way of thinking (though stress seems to be ever present, oops).

Some background may be useful here. When I was a child, I was deeply religious. I was raised in both my father’s Catholic faith (by attending catechism for while) and the Methodist Church (as my mother was raised a Lutheran but didn’t have that kind of church anywhere nearby in our tiny town). I eventually went more the route of the Methodist Church, getting baptized voluntarily and the whole nine yards and attending church regularly.

Being very young, impressionable and the kind of perfectionist I am, I picked up the religion and was very afraid of sinning and screwing up. I did a lot of self-policing in both my actions and thoughts due to the teachings of the church. In fact, I had a very specific view of what judgment day would look like, and I did my best to suppress bad thoughts because of it, probably going along the lines of the teachings of if you even think it in your heart, it’s as if you’d done it. I always pictured that sort of purgatory to be everyone gathered around a huge screen, and one by one, people would be called up to be judged. Surrounded by everyone you knew and loved as well as anyone you’d ever thought anything about, the entirety of your life, including all thoughts you’d had, would be played for everyone to hear, and they would hear all these things and collectively judge you to be worthy or not.

You might imagine this was a good way for tiny me to worry about pretty much every thought that came into my head that I deemed sinful. What if the person I thought that thought about could hear me? Would I still think that way? Why do these awful thoughts seem to linger far longer than I want them to, only compounding the feelings of unworthiness? Even now, I still have many moments where something will pop into my head— a bad judgement, an unkind gesture, a knee-jerk reaction, and I’ll feel like a horrible person because of it.

However, Headspace has been slowly picking at this notion for me. The app had a meditation I picked at random one night that had a teaching that, after probably listening to it several times, struck a chord. (Meditation in general probably has this teaching, but given that my experience is almost entirely with that app, I am only attributing it to Headspace.) Anyway… The teaching was that you are not your thoughts. Sure, bad thoughts will come into your head from time to time, but they have no bearing on who you are as a person and what you do with those thoughts. You can choose to engage with them or not, and meditation teaches that it’s best to let the thoughts pass and let go of them, whether good or bad, so you can focus on the present moment.

Hearing that I’m not my thoughts was something that went against pretty much everything my religious background taught me. Don’t do this, or you’re unworthy. Don’t do that, or you’ll burn for eternity. No. It was more thoughts are thoughts, and you don’t have to do anything with them but acknowledge they exist. In fact, if you acknowledge them rather than trying to push them away, you can let them go more easily and allow yourself the space and grace to get back to who you want to be.

Or… something.

I can’t say I’m very good at this type of thought process. It’s something I’m very much still working on and trying to unravel in regards to how I’ve lived my life and thought about things up to the present moment, and it’s very difficult to unlearn something that has been really ingrained from the start, even if I haven’t been religious for quite some time now. (I still identify as agnostic and erring on the side of faith because I believe there is a higher order to the universe, but I don’t believe in anything so strongly as to tell another person that this is the one true way to believe and see the world. Probably another reason I can’t say I’m very good at this type of thought process.) Still, it has been refreshing in a way to be able to step away from some of my crueler thoughts and not necessarily attach them to who I am as a person. I don’t need to use them as identifiers and descriptions of my overall character. It’s kind of nice not to necessarily immediately criticize that part of myself that is constantly chattering, even if I don’t always like what it has to say.

But if judgment day does end up being the way my childhood self thought it would be, I’m definitely still in trouble.

Remember Me

2020-01-21T18:33:52Z

On the eve of induction, I pause to remember. Not intentionally, even if it is always in the back of my head. I will life to continue though I'm acutely aware I have no control. I beg for movement though it sometimes hurts. It's never far away, yet I feel guilty being distracted from it, like if I stop thinking about the losses, I won't honor their memory.

It colors everything but still ends up having no bearing on how things will go.

Nothing replaces them. People ask if he has come yet, if we are excited. Of course we are, and yet we are also utterly terrified. The unknown has a way of doing that to you--smacking you upside the head when you think you're prepared and have it finally (mostly?) figured out. "Even now?" They ask. Yes, even now.

But hope is also here, tenuous as it may seem. I try not to grasp onto it too hard for fear of jinxing the situation, another weird semblance of control over the uncontrollable. A holdover from better days of confidence when I didn't know any better. I look forward to the future even if it lays in the shadowy unknown, but the past always lays still, unchanging except when perspective and new experience shifts it in my mind. Can't change what happened. Can't predict what will. Can only keep moving and reach for what's coming with open arms.

And hope. Hope though it will be hard. Hope though you have no idea how you'll get through. Hope though all that came before continues to break your heart. Hope though you don't know how.

And remember. Remember though we weren't able to actually meet. Remember I held you however briefly and still hold you in my heart. Remember me, as I remember you.

The Cadence of Life

2019-04-08T00:27:36Z

It was a long, boring week. We finally had a weekend off after three weeks straight of work, and they made up for it last week by barely getting any work to us. I taught the new folks amendments and reprints. I did another round of teaching to our backup crew who helps proof when they can. Almost every day, the majority of the typists were out sick. (At points in most of the week, we were without typists at all, a rare occurrence.) Still, there wasn't much to speak of in the way of exciting things happening. We're waiting on another deadline that will hit on Friday followed by first house passage on the 23rd, which is usually the worst deadline in terms of "Hey, it's 4 a.m. Please come back at 7:30 a.m." infamy we've had to deal with in the past. Given the ridiculous backlog of work we've had to push out in the shortest amount of time I recall in my eight years of working for the state, I can only hope that's not a trend that will continue the whole session, but I also have my doubts. I've never been as aware of the cadence of session and what lies ahead before as well as having so many opposing waves of worry and apathy. Perhaps having so many personal things going on at the same time has something to do with it.

Thursday, I got a text from my mom asking how I was doing. I knew she had dropped by after my dad's appointment at the VA to get a check from Mike, and Mike said she had mentioned that my dad might need spinal surgery. They had been awaiting MRI results on his back because his legs have been bothering him and he's been losing his balance and falling a lot recently, so I was a little surprised it might require surgery. They were also supposed to get an update on the new medication my dad has been taking for his memory for a few weeks, but Mike didn't say anything about that. Still feeling exhausted from the workweek, I finally got up and called her after exchanging a few texts and seeing that she was writing something for quite a while.

She said she hadn't wanted to bother me since she knew Mike was leaving for the final four trip the next day. (Did I ever mention he won that through work? Maybe not. Humph, I'm always a little behind, but it's pretty neat. He took his friend Nate, and a customer got to go as well.) Anyway, I wanted to know how the appointment went since she's been worked up about not getting the MRI results for almost a month. It turns out he has a few disks in his spine that are slipping near his tailbone, and the spinal column is narrowing, causing the nerves to get squeezed (or something? I only sort of understand). Since this means inflammation isn't the cause of his pain, the next step is they've been referred to a neurosurgeon to see if he needs surgery or if there are other steps they can take first. Also, my mom was able to convince him to get a walker for stability when he's out and about, and also, it qualifies him for permanent disability placards for the car, which is probably helpful since he seems a little wobbly when he walks now.

Regarding the medicine, she said, "You ever read 'Flowers for Algernon'? This kind of reminds me of that." I said I had but didn't remember how the story went. She explained, "Well, there's a man who gives medicine to a mouse, and the mouse's memory improves for a bit. So the man starts taking the medicine, and his memory improves for a bit. But then he sees that the mouse declines, and he knows his is going to decline again too."

My dad has Alzheimer's disease.

The doctor didn't give her a stage, but he said that's what the medicine is for. My mom says it has improved his short-term memory over the last couple of months, and his memory seems to be pretty stable. The medicine sometimes causes nightmares, but those have subsided. My dad seems pretty happy, she says. It's made him much more pleasant to be around, she says. He thinks it is a miracle drug.

My selfish first thoughts were, "What if we're finally able to have children, and he doesn't remember them?" followed by, "I should have seen this coming. Granny didn't remember me right before she died either, and that was devastating."

My parents have been in the process of trying to figure out some of his projects. She's been after him for years to sell the radio station and find someone to take over the Irish-English dictionary he's been working on for almost forty years, since we won't know what to do with it. He's supposed to have someone from the Irish government coming by soon to take a look at it and see if they're able to take the whole project off his hands, which would be the best place for it. They also have someone interested in the radio signal and station, even with its outdated equipment. He's also expressing interest in selling some of his ham radio equipment he doesn't use and is headed to a swap meet in Visalea next weekend to see if he can get rid of some stuff.

While I am somewhat relieved that they are taking care of these loose ends, I am worried that all of this happening at once is a bad sign of things to come. I asked my mom, "What is he going to do with his time if he doesn't have those projects to work on?" She said he still has his other hobby of framing computer components for his "museum" he keeps in the house. That'll keep him busy for a while, she thinks. He has to have something to do, after all. He can't fade that quickly, right? Really, who knows?

My brother called last night and said my mom had told him. He then launched into all these things that he should be doing now that dad's on "borrowed time." He said realistically, there's probably about a year before dad declines completely, and it was probably up to my brother to start cataloguing stuff for my dad's museum. He expressed sadness that he didn't spend more time with him before now and said he'd need to do more.

I got angry at him immediately. I told him to stop.

Yeah, I get it. I really do. It's a scary prospect to think that one day, Dad won't recognize us. It's terrifying to wonder about the future and how things are going to change. I had my own selfish thoughts. I had my own wonders about where my mother has been now that she's decided to be my dad's advocate when she hasn't even really seemed to like the man in many, many years. (And Mike's right here too. When I said this, he said, "You can't blame her. At least she's here now.") I've thought about how much life has changed since we've left home, and even now as I sit here, I wonder why I didn't go out to eat with him more often like he always said we should.

Still... As I told my brother, we can't change what we've done in the past. We can't predict how long we have left. No one knows that. We don't know how his memory will go or what kind of quality we'll have or the length we'll have before it's all gone. Don't put a timeline on it. Don't stop living your life. Things are changing, but it doesn't mean life is over already. Dad's still here. His memory is still here. It could be years before it goes away entirely. Live in the present. Do your best going forward. That's how life goes.

I say these things to him hoping I'll remember them myself when times are dark and when hope seems lost. Live for today. It's all we have.

"There, for the grace of God go I"

2019-01-21T04:02:47Z

Grief hits in weird pockets, with no warning. Today it was during the beginning of a workout, that familiar welling up in the edges of my eyes. Here and gone. The rise and fall of remembering and wondering what's next.

More and more, we remember random things said during appointments but can only paraphrase the meaning behind it, tinged as it is with our own overwhelming emotions and fatigue. "At some point, people get tired of the loss and decide they can't go through any more, so they stop trying." There's only so many times you can take. How many more times do we have left in us before it's just too much to go on?

Songs play and replay. Lyrics appear and leave only to surface again. Found and known, all genres and nothing off limits. Different for both of us, so I only recognize my own with any sort of intimacy. We assign them to losses and try to differentiate, but they start to run together.

Jetty Rae:
"Hold on Darling one more day you’ll wake up, wake up, wake up
And everything will be okay..."

Against Me!:
"All the places that we never went; all the times we never had
I want them back now, I want them all back
I wanted you to be more real than all the others
I wanted our love to be more real than all of the rest..."

Offspring:
"Maybe in another life
I could find you there
Pulled away before your time
I can't deal it's so unfair

And it feels
And it feels like
Heaven's so far away
Yeah it feels like
The world has grown cold
Now that you've gone away..."

The firstborn was a surprise. We only thought the second one was fast (and ironically occupies the same space as all middle children now). The youngest one was gone before we even knew it was real. It feels like an endless feedback loop where we compare and story-tell and justify the narrative even though it never seems to congeal or make sense.

What's next? Another?

Flogging Molly:
"Lost was the child we all once did hide
There, for the grace of God
There, for the grace of God
There, for the grace of God go I..."

A Tree

2019-01-11T05:20:23Z

"A Tree"
A tree in dead of winter
doesn't lament its bare
branches or lack of
leaves

Instead, with sweet somnolence,
it stands silent, knowing
and waiting for
Spring
1/10/2019

Loss Number Three

2018-12-23T15:41:15Z

Where do I begin, the beginning? Where did this begin? It seems like this has been failing to start for so long that I'm shocked it's over already, but I'm also already getting ahead of myself.

We'll start where we left off last time, with numbers:
Last Sunday: Another test in morning, first faint positive.
Tuesday: Another test in evening, second faint positive.
Wednesday: A call to the doctor; a blood test; slight spotting.
Thursday: A doctor's appointment; an ultrasound showing fluid and thickened lining but nothing else; slight spotting.
Friday: Word that blood test was screwed up by lab, but HCG reading of 33; increased spotting over course of day; another test in evening, third faint positive; still, passage of tissue and clots in evening.
Saturday: A trip to the emergency room for five hours; another blood test, with a HCG reading of 11; a third diagnosis of miscarriage, one year and a week since the first; another rhoGAM shot.

I've been searching for this one for what feels like an eternity. To be gone so soon after finally confirming it is a shock to the system. Mike said it just never felt right, like something was wrong from the beginning. He is probably right. I sit here awake with my stomach and organs trembling, rolling over and over themselves in some sort of attempt to clear my system of this potential. Whatever it was. Whatever it could have been. Whatever it will never be now.

I thought maybe if I didn't speak to it, it might be okay. If I didn't acknowledge it, maybe it wouldn't hurt so bad. Surely something had to work. Some part of me hoped that by not repeating what I've clung to in the past, it would somehow save things, like running in the opposite direction would stave off this deja vu of a loss. It would have to be different this time, right?

Of course it would, but not in that way. Each loss is different. I knew what to look for and waited for the signs, but they were different, recognizable but distinct enough to cause confusion and leave us clinging to a small smattering of hope. That optimism that only dies in the wake of the reality of a loss even faster than the others. Barely known before it's waving goodbye.

I keep trying to fit this into a narrative, to justify what's happened and make sense of it, I suppose, but there are no words that can convey the depths of my sorrow. There's no finality to any of this, only a deluge of unanswerable questions: What did I do wrong this time? Is this just what happens to us now? Is anything different ever going to happen? How do you contextualize that? How do you square yourself with the fact that this only happens to a small percentage of people, and you're now among them? Where do we go from here? Do we even bother trying again?

I couldn't even bring myself to memorialize the last one in paint, and now there are three. I wish I would have had longer. I wish the tremors in my belly were signs of life. I wish it weren't two days before Christmas. I wish I could just crawl into a hole and be done for a while.

I don't really know what else to say.

Numbers

2018-12-11T02:32:39Z

Again, apologies. I have several other entries I need to get to, including the divulging of secrets. I was just hoping I'd have something more positive to add to that list, and it's not looking likely at this point.

In the meantime, I have to put this numbers game somewhere:
45 days into this cycle
30 days+ Resting heart rate elevated
16 days sore tits
5 pregnancy tests taken within 2 weeks (all negative)

It feels monumentally fucked up that I'm waiting to see blood right now-- near the first anniversary of finding out we'd lose our firstborn and beyond that within a few days of the anniversary of having to take medication to force my body to bleed it out.

I've been anticipating a different result for so many weeks, hoping I had predicted correctly again, only to now be preparing to be disappointed, even if the alternative is equally terrifying. I don't know what I was expecting really. It's just going to be a period, a temporary distraction. I should have known. Why even bother trying?

No one wants to hear it. No one wants to talk about it. I get it.

I'm really tired of being alive right now.

I did not expect to feel this sad.

2018-11-08T02:16:19Z

A tornado of emotions hit with little to no alarm, or some other natural-disaster based metaphor where everything is left utterly destroyed in its wake. No warnings, unless you count the ones I probably chose to ignore. I find myself sitting in the closet after I've undressed for the day feeling tired and on the verge of tears. No reason for this I can speak of. Life is okay enough. I check in anyway. I think about the date. I think about several dates, and I remember what time of year it is. Of course.

I did not expect to feel this sad.

I look at the fun-sized Krackle bars in the Halloween bucket and remember how weird they tasted. I unwrap one and eat it, but it doesn't taste the same now. I dig all of the bars out of the bucket and hand them to Mike, saying, "Please eat these. They're making me sad." Coincidentally, no one comes to trick or treat at our house. I turn out the light and head to bed early.

I did not expect to feel this sad.

I get angry at work, convinced that people are doing things on purpose only to find the same people are doing the same things they always do. I wonder why I can't just get over it, why these things bother me just that tiny bit more this time, why it seems to always be my problem and conversely try to convince myself to change my attitude about it all, to let the feelings wash over me and pass by. I think again about employee assistance and contemplate how much is too much to bear alone.

I did not expect to feel this sad.

But I remember. Of course I remember. Why would I not, given the importance I place on specific dates and rituals and how I feel from season to season? I remember where I was, where I hoped I'd be. All the dreams and wishes and entire lifetimes spread out before us before we even got a chance to temper them with these kinds of what ifs. Lives changed forever and yet still seeming the same now to the untrained eye. Because we have to. Because there's nothing else we can do.

I did not expect to feel this sad.

Yet here we are. Two months on today since the most recent passage. A year on tomorrow since we first found out. So close together and yet whole worlds apart. The absences a distant memory for those who don't have to live with them. The devastation ripped open afresh, and the guilt still tender from not being quite so devastated by the second one, like it was all going to happen regardless. I can't shake the feeling that I could have done something differently though I know intellectually I couldn't. It's gone now. Wringing my hands of all this. Still reeling. Still hurt. Still broken. But still getting out of bed and going to work, trying to act normal because no one wants to hear it this far on. We move on for the sake of it. That's what you're supposed to do, right? What else are you going to do?

I did not expect to feel this sad.

Closed

2018-09-11T18:50:43Z

I took another walk this morning. Since the usual walking path I use has been closed for repairs for a while, I attempted to go to a different path I know of but usually don't take because it's a long way. Once I got there, I found a sign as well as a construction crew saying it was being repaired too.

Me being me, as I trudged through the sand on the side of the road instead, I couldn't help but see parallels and metaphors of this in my own life.

It seems like everywhere I turn, the familiar paths, the easy ways through and around things, are closing for whatever reason. I don't know if they'll reopen or if this is permanent. I can't see beyond the horizon. I don't know what's in store or even what it is I have to feel strongly about anymore. No one really knows the depths of this, nor do I know the cavernous losses of others. Such is only relation at this point, misplaced empathy and good intentions. Advice that falls on deaf ears.

It's hard not to compare our situation to others around us, those who seem to have really simple, straightforward things that I can't seem to grasp. Everywhere I turn, it looks like someone else is having a problem-free carriage, and I'm here stuck wondering what makes us different. I know appearances aren't always what they seem, but it's difficult not to ask those questions. I end up contemplating whether I was right to fear having children in my twenties, though I did so for entirely different reasons. I question the wisdom of continuing to try when all of it seems so far out of reach, getting further and further away each time. I wring my hands over yet another loss and think about how we're both partially at the end of the line.

I hear people around us saying to be happy with what you have, over and over again like it will help. I look around at our life, and of course it is satisfactory. I think ahead of what we can do with our lives now that our time will no longer be filled with thoughts of you. I place my hand on my now shrinking belly, as I have so many times in the past month, but I no longer speak. I feel empty and alone.

"Hope"

2018-08-25T05:33:38Z

Hope, that irrepressible thing
That alate, whose carapace crushed
still flies into the flame
8/24/2018

R.I.P. Grandpa

2018-05-06T16:59:53Z

It has been a rough six months. Friday, I was elated because we had finally gotten everything we need to finish codification, a project that has unfathomably taken longer than the eight months it took us last cycle, and I was preparing to work this weekend to see where we could get on the last few documents before Monday. With a little over two hours left in the day, I heard my phone vibrate with an incoming call from my younger sister, who hardly ever calls unless she needs something.

The call was short. She said Stephanie had called. Grandpa Gabby had died. No further details.

I tried to keep it together but couldn't. I made arrangements with my boss. I apologized and said goodbye to Heidi, since it was her last day and we were having a going away party that started in ten minutes. My boss said we were in good shape and not to worry about the weekend since they weren't going to make it mandatory to work. "It'll be okay. I'm sorry you're hurting."

Still, I left feeling guilty. Also devastated. Numb. Shocked. Full of regret. I hadn't called on his birthday in April. Why couldn't I get myself to do even that? What had we talked about the last time we called anyway? Oh right. I couldn't understand what he was saying because I had woken him up or he was drunk or something. Grandma said he had fallen recently and been in the hospital, as had she, but they were out now. She asked if I had put in an order for a baby.

Right... That's why I didn't call often. He was usually the one who couldn't go one phone conversation without bringing that up, or he'd start teasing me about something though I'd asked him multiple times over the years to stop. There were consequences to these calls, and it was easier to avoid them if I could.

Still, what kind of justifications are those now that we'll never speak again? How had I managed to make things so complicated?

We grew up across the street from them. They basically helped raise us from the start. My whole childhood, they were there, and they didn't move until I was in college or just fresh out. Every time my mom needed someone to watch us, they were there. For every major event, they were there. I can't express how intertwined our lives were or how many happy memories I have alongside the not-so-great ones that seemed to increase in the past decade. That's what happens with people who you're closer to than even your actual grandparents. How do you even begin?

One of my earliest memories of him is the smell of pipe tobacco. To this day, I only associate that smell with him and my mother's father, though he smoked straight cigarettes up until the time he was put on a ventilator. I remember his row of pipes on the mantle of their fireplace, though I'm still not sure when he stopped smoking completely. He was the only man I've ever seen smoke a pipe, which seems relegated to the past and whoever grows a hipster handlebar mustache and insists it tastes better that way.

Then there was the food. He grew up in the depression era and had so many stories. One about how he used to love mayonnaise when he first got to Texas and once ate a whole jar of it as a kid. After that, he said, he didn't like it as much, and I never saw him put a lot on sandwiches. They used Miracle Whip, though, which I never really liked either. No matter what, whenever we'd drop by, he'd ask if we were hungry and load up a plate of whatever Grandma had around: fideo or conchitas with lots of hot sauce and pepper, carnitas, tamales, homemade tortillas stuffed with refried beans and cheese or eggs or cheese or peanut butter and jelly or straight up melted butter. The food was almost always homemade, as they had owned a restaurant in Arizona before moving here. Anything put on your plate had to be eaten or you were wasting it, even if you weren't hungry to begin with. Food was love, and that was that. I still dream about their food and miss it fiercely.

Usually whenever we'd be there, the TV would be on. Reruns. Talk shows. Nascar. Boxing. Disney shows for the kids, like "The Three Caballeros". He'd sit in his easy chair or on the floor and ask us to do things for him. Or crack his knuckles and grab your bare toes and pop the joints. (I hate this to this day. That's how I found out I hate anyone touching my feet.) He'd lay on the floor and ask someone to walk on his back to relieve the pressure. He'd ask if you wanted a knuckle sandwich then show you not to put your thumb inside when making a fist because, "You'll break your own thumb when you're punching someone." He'd laugh and tease, saying how pretty and ugly you were in the same sentence or how smart and how much he loved us. He gave me the nickname "overqualified" in later years after I was valedictorian and got my bachelor's degree. He always asked if Mike (or whoever I was dating) was treating me right, echoing the refrain of "Boys are stupid" that he'd said my whole dating life. He'd tell me not to put up with anyone calling me names, hitting me or mistreating me in any way, which is a little ironic.

He called popcorn "parcan". Also, Pepsi was "Pexi". My siblings and I would try to correct him, and he'd say it several times before getting it right only to say it the other way again later on. I always chalked this up to him always joking around and a little bit to a language barrier, that the Spanish he also spoke got in the way somehow. I didn't know until my mom mentioned it a few days ago that this is why they called him "Gabby" though his name was Savino. She said that he had trouble speaking and they were making fun of his speech impediment he'd had since he was a child growing up around migrant workers.

His birthday was on April Fool's day, and I remember him tricking us multiple times on his birthday, turning out all the lights in the house and saying the power was out only to laugh when we'd go and try the light switches. There were candles that wouldn't blow out. Cards that wouldn't open. All the usual pranks. One year, my mom frosted a brick and gave it to him as a birthday cake. We all laughed as he tried to cut it, and she eventually brought out a real cake. I don't know that I ever actually wished him a real happy birthday without some sort of trick to it.

He had a primitive snake tattoo that curled up his arm, one he gave himself with pen ink and a needle but always said he wouldn't recommend anyone doing that. He always had family around, with his three biological kids along with one adopted runaway. Their grandkids were our friends and near cousins. We met many of their actual cousins as Grandma and Grandpa babysat us and took us to many meals and ice cream the next town over, places to visit, parades to watch, people to see. They had two adopted cats named Bimbo and Stinky, so-named because they found her at the dump. He worked landscaping for my mom while Grandma watched us and translated for the local court.

So many memories. Grandpa used to smile and say in later years while they still lived in Smith, "Thank God for Jeane and Patrick. Otherwise I don't know what we'd do." I wouldn't understand the context of that statement, or his daughter Mila turning to my mom and saying, "Thank God you will take care of them," at the 50 year anniversary party they threw, for a really long time. Grandma would say they needed to watch the house whenever we were gone. Even as teenagers, they didn't want to leave us alone and said they'd watch us whenever. It all seemed cordial and mutual, though my mom griped over the years about grandpa overwatering or Grandma not letting us go outside when it was hot.

It wasn't until I was an adult that it entirely went south between them and my parents. My parents owned the house Grandma and Grandpa lived in across the street, and for many, many years, they had traded babysitting and landscaping services for rent money. My mom did the math and said they hadn't paid the rent in years though we'd been out of the house for a long time and landscaping services had slowed since Grandpa's knees and health weren't stellar, so she asked for it. That one is not my story to tell because I know it's much more complex than I'm making it seem, but I know not too long after it all was settled, Grandma and Grandpa made arrangements to move back to Arizona, where they'd lived before moving to Nevada and so they could be closer to other family who had moved there.

I've seen them only a handful of times since then, and I've never gone down to visit. I've never had time or made the time. It'll be awkward, I reasoned. I don't even know the family much outside of facebook, and there have been slights on both sides, I've said. The last time I saw them together was our wedding, and as happens at weddings, we were only able to talk for a little bit before being pulled away for other things. I didn't know that would be the last time I saw him entirely. I didn't know the last conversation I'd have with him, which I avoided as long as I could after the miscarriage because I knew what his questions would be, I'd barely understand. I didn't know.

My mom said she found out from talking to Stephanie that he had Bell's Palsy the last few years, and my not understanding him suddenly makes a lot more sense now. Being partially paralyzed will do that to you. I feel bad that I assumed he was just tired or drunk when I talked to him and didn't get what he was saying, though he also liked to talk about whiskey and tequila and ask if I was at the bar. I didn't know. After his birthday in April, I got an invite to a last-minute surprise birthday party for his 80th birthday being thrown by his daughter. I declined because I had other plans that weekend, but my mom said that Grandma had found out about the party and shut it down because his health was already declining and he was not himself then. She said she's heard that he had an infection in the time since then that they weren't sure they could clean out or operate on or something. He had been in the hospital but had been moved to rehab and was doing better for a few days before his blood pressure dropped. They took him to emergency and said it might have been a stroke. Details are spotty, but he died there. He's gone now. Probably out of pain and in a better place.

I keep feeling waves of emotions: guilt over the things I couldn't make myself do, sadness over his passing, numbness in between. Memories keep washing over me, and I realize that I'll never hear him sing "Happy birthday, mijita" seguing into "Gloria, gloria halleluja" again. I know I told him I loved him last time I talked to him because we always ended the conversation that way, but I wish I was able to hug him one last time, to let him know I really meant it despite everything that's happened over the years.

I don't know how to end this entry, so I'll copy what I wrote after I found out:

Time sure moves fast, even faster than it feels sometimes. The older we get, the more it seems to speed up. One day out of the blue, something happens where you'll realize while looking through old photos how few you have with people you love, how much you would have liked to spend more time with them but kept making excuses, how even when it's hard, you should have made time because now there isn't any left. I'll cherish the many happy memories I have, but I also have a few regrets.

"You don't even know you're being unkind."

2018-01-21T18:12:12Z

I had dreams last night where it seems like every one of my exes made an appearance. I was dating one and holding hands with another while still being aware I'm married, some sort of simultaneous dating, cheating and nothing situation all at once. Another came in while I was hanging out with his friends I haven't seen in years and gave me a kid's puzzle, which was sentimental in the dream because it implied that he remembered giving me one in the past. When he made a passive aggressive comment about when we dated, I made one right back that landed perfectly, which I don't know that I was ever able to do in real life. I'm not usually that hostile in dreams. Who's to say what any of this means?

I feel numb mostly. I've had a lot of bad days recently where unexpected things trigger me-- a post online where someone mentioned twins, a conversation about a coworker's granddaughter where she said something about wanting to be the grandma she never had, a thought that I still miss my Uncle John and Granny and Granda but don't feel as badly about it as when they died, though that just made me jealous that they got to spend time with it now and question whether it was even a baby at all since it died when it was only a cluster of cells. So early. With the doctor's office calling last Monday with the news that my hormone levels are back down to zero and to call when I wind up pregnant again, it's like it never happened at all.

I bought supplies last week to paint. I have plans for a memorial of sorts, though every time I think I know what I want to do, it doesn't seem right or to do it justice. I haven't painted in a long time, and I'm not sure I have the skills to execute what I want to do anyway. I don't know. It can't hurt to try, I guess. Some of the hardest parts of this have been not having anything tangible to point to other than tears cried and blood shed. I've heard and read many stories of other women who have been through this, but it still feels so isolating, like I'm unmoored in a rowboat in the middle of the sea, paddles cast aside as the waves wash up and over me unbidden.

It feels at once necessary and histrionic to be grieving still. I want to talk about it, but I also know the burden is entirely ours. People don't know what to say, and I can't blame them. I try blaming myself, and it goes nowhere. I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, but I force it. Can't spend all day crying. Can't sit in stony silence hoping everything will stop to let this pass. Death comes to all of us eventually. Hearts break. Time supposedly heals. Life moves on.

Recent Dreams

2017-09-25T03:52:58Z

I had a dream last night where a woman let me know about a governmental conspiracy via a document she gave me. It was something involving proofreading. I spent the rest of the dream trying to tell as many people as possible about the conspiracy because I knew I would be caught before long. However, each person I told, I seemed to lose more and more details about the conspiracy and why it was significant. By the time I forced myself awake, I could barely string a few words together but knew it was important to say the words anyway.

That's all I remember. I've had a lot of crazy dreams lately, really detailed stuff that fills me with dread upon waking but spares me the details. I semi-chalk this up to taking sleep vitamins at night, but surprisingly, the dreams about being late for work/school/whatever dream world thinks is important have dissipated lately, even on Sunday nights when they are usually present in spades and wake me up multiple times before my alarm goes off. Not exactly sure why, but it is a nice change of pace. It'd be nice if all the nightmares and the sleep paralysis went away, though. Always a little frightening.

I had a longer entry I wanted to write about what I was thinking about earlier during my walk, but dreamwidth seems to be lagging quite a bit. I will attempt this again when the site isn't eating half my words as soon I type them. Happy Sunday, all.

Williams' Response

2017-04-08T04:35:56Z

"Williams' Response"
Yea, the beauty of the missiles
falling from the sky,
the illumination as it bursts
and settles soft
on the people, dead and dying
below
04-07-2017

Mistaken Auroras

2017-03-25T06:14:55Z

I called one of my coworkers "Aurora" today. I told her immediately that this was a compliment because my best friend's name is Aurora. Not sure if she believed me or not, but she said she liked that name. (My coworker's name is Doris. Not even close to Aurora, by the way.)

Damn, I'm tired. I've worked every day since the 12th. Working tomorrow, the next day and next week too. I'm waiting for laundry to dry so I can go to bed. Ah, oh well. What do you do, right?