My blog is often my creative outlet, a way of making sense of the world. Taking an issue, wrestling with the details, framing it a certain way, putting a personal stamp on it. It is also stress relief. I talk through some of the things that are bothering me, a monologue with myself that I share publicly. Sometimes they provoke reactions, likes on FB or a comment or two. Many times they don’t. While I would love to have thousands of people hanging on my every written word, I write most of the time for me. A diary of sorts. Maybe a legacy that my son will some day read, wondering, “What did Dad think about that?”.
Yet because I write for me, sometimes as potentially the only one who will read the post, I also cannot hide in sophistry or metaphor. I believe strongly in as much transparency in relationships as they can handle, sometimes more than is comfortable, and that transparency has to apply to my relationship with myself. But even though it is sometimes hard, I know that my writing is good for me. An outlet of release.
Which is why I am posting something when I really don’t feel like posting or doing anything. I want to curl up in a ball and shut out the world. If it wasn’t for COVID, I’d probably want to go somewhere for a week, turn off my phone, and just shut down. To simply “be”, find my centre, and let my body and mind recharge. A form of CTRL-ALT-DELETE for my internal software and external hardware.
Except life doesn’t work like that, of course. You can’t run away from problems, and if they’re mental noise, they end up going anywhere you go too. I’ve often wondered if I’d be better off having an interest in alcohol occasionally. Something to just overwhelm the brain and shut it off for awhile. I tend to mute it through distraction instead, binge-watching something or a project. But I’m having trouble filtering the noise right now.
A good portion of it is COVID, of course. I feel like I want to go to a mall and just walk around. No shopping, no interactions with anyone, just go and walk around. Do something somewhat normal. I won’t, we are still a high-risk household, after all.
Some of it is the winter. I do tend to get squirrelly in February, although I’m barely noticing other than having to clear snow off the car. I barely even know it is winter or anything outside of the pod.
But my issues with my leg are getting to me. I can wrap my head around the compression socks, maybe not well, maybe not right away, but it’s noise. I did my fitting today for some custom socks, yay, and it’s not a big deal in the long run. Same shit, different day. Whatever.
I was able to wrap my head around the trips to wound care, constant wrapping, the extra hassles with showering, etc. Mostly because I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. My leg was improving, the wound was healing, the compression was helping.
And then last week blew that to hell in a handbasket.
My wound started to get angry and red again, I had multiple appointments by phone with my doctor to go back on the antibiotic horse pills for another 14d. I also had multiple “rush” appointments with the wound care people after I had to rip the compression off on Saturday and again today because the wound was starting to hurt like the Dickens. I think the bandage is somehow slipping under the compression over time, and it is “pulling” at the wound. My nurse thinks it is because I’m not keeping my legs elevated during the day, which while working at a desk for 8h isn’t a great combo.
So where does that leave me? Basically with a wound that is almost back to square one and the likelihood that my next stop is going to be an ER sometime. Who the f*** knows what they’ll actually do for me if I go, since I’m already receiving wound care and antibiotics. I suppose IV antibiotics is a possibility.
Yet when I look at that list, you know what I see?
Whining.
It’s not that serious in the end. There are people out there with real serious health problems and I’m not talking about simply COVID. I’m talking about chronic pain conditions. Things they deal with and live with, and I can’t help but wonder.
If I’m this much of a basket case with a simple leg wound, what will I be like when I get to a point with REAL problems to live with?
That is what is frying my mental bacon. The weakness, the face of the future, my comfort and ability to handle mental stress and emotional turmoil but which seems to fail me completely when dealing with physical discomfort.
With a slightly serious segue, it is made me think about the MAID legislation that is going through. Medical Assistance In Dying. And it makes me wonder. Is that me in the future? Am I going to be THAT guy? The one who is in some discomfort, isn’t dying anytime soon, is relatively mentally competent (or at least as I ever was) but simply cannot endure the day to day that is misery?
I already live in fear of mental decline. For someone who has always lived in his mind, has always used his mind to separate himself apart from others in school or work, who defines himself by his mind, the thought of that mind not being “there” to continue to define myself is relatively terrifying. If my fear of snakes was put in comparison with fear of dementia, snakes would be about a 2 compared to a 12 for dementia. Even while knowing that ironically, I won’t know if it does decline.
Anyway.
On the other hand, I’m not in distress, I’m not in crisis. It’s a setback, I’ll bounce back. I’ll write, I’ll do Lego, I’ll do some stuff on my website design. But first I’m going to take a mental health day on Wednesday, as I didn’t feel like I’d really accomplish anything at work anyway.
Oh, and I’ll take out the garbage and recycling. I’ve already cleared snow twice today (Tuesday) so I’m hoping I won’t need to do that on Wednesday too, if I can help it. More coming on Thursday. Yay.
At least I was outside for awhile, right?
In the meantime, I blog late at night, throwing my words out into the abyss. A week ago I reached 1500 posts, and I didn’t even notice. I probably need to celebrate that milestone somehow, just not sure what it is yet.
I have been having a strange recurring thought over the last few weeks. It isn’t a new thought, it’s more an occasional thought that has come up with previous experiences that become clearer in hindsight than they were in the actual moment.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking about not seeing something in a moment, and then realizing days later. I mean events that you have experienced, went through with planning and awareness, carefully considered things, thought about them before and afterwards, and then later, something twigs your memory and you think, “Huh. That’s weird.”
I have an experience with a friend from back in the day that didn’t go the way I had hoped. In fact, it ended the friendship. And I felt maybe if I had said x or y, maybe it would have changed things. Maybe I could have handled it differently. Taking responsibility for the outcome. Yet years later, I was reflecting on it after something twigged my memory, and it was suddenly so clear that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. It didn’t matter what I said or didn’t say, the outcome was already determined by them before I ever started the conversation. It was a stage play, I was just the only one thinking it was improv. Yet both before and afterwards, I had never thought about that as a likely or even possible interpretation. But when I thought of it, it was so obvious as to leave me thunderstruck. I reflect on my life daily. Yet such a basic realization had escaped me. Huh.
And sure, I know that there’s a body of literature out there that suggests these moments of clarity, or perhaps “new clarity” or realization, happen because the emotional content of the event has dissipated. Unblocking you from processing it more rationally. I get it, I can see it, I can even think in some instances that is likely what was happening. In part because when I thought back on it, I followed the same pathway into the event that got me there in the first place. But for the new realization, my memory was twigged in a different way, and I went back to the memory along a different path from normal. And thus literally gave myself a whole new perspective in coming upon the memory.
As a metaphor, it works. But it also works in reality for another memory I have had. We used to shop at a Towers store in Peterborough, which eventually became a Zellers and a Walmart. There is a grocery store attached which was a Dominion, and then I think a Food City, and either Food Basics or Price Choppers now, can’t remember. Anyway, when I was a kid, it was one of the two big box stores (the other being Kmart) where we would go to get Christmas presents, maybe some clothes (if it wasn’t Sears), etc. And yet I was thinking of the store one time and I could NOT picture what it looked like inside. I could picture the outside more or less, but I could not at all remember what the inside looked like. Until I remembered they had a different set of smaller doors on the other side of the store with a very small parking area, only one row. My mother ALWAYS parked over there. As soon as I remembered that, I could remember coming in that door, and voila, my memory was unlocked and I could remember where EVERYTHING in the store had been.
The metaphor for a similar revelation mostly works. If I go in one door, I follow the path as far as I can. Go in another door, a whole different path.
What event is playing with my brain?
In short, my wedding day. And more pointedly, the role of my mother in the wedding day. Going into the wedding day, I had several plans for how to avoid any drama with my family. I wasn’t worried about Andrea’s family, but mine has always been dysfunctional at the best of times. Add in formal settings, people being uncomfortable, everyone together, alcohol? Not a great combo.
So I planned ahead. I didn’t want any drama with my “best man” selection. I had a couple of early ideas, just to balance out Becky as Maid of Honour, but they didn’t work out, and I did NOT want any family drama. I don’t even know if there would have been any between brothers, as I have three main brothers and three more in-laws. I was close with my brother Bill when younger, then my brother Don in my teen years, and my brother Mike in my adult years. I spent a lot of time with my brother-in-law Ken when I was early teens, and Bob was a pretty comforting presence when my Dad died. And if I went with just “time” in recent years, that would be Dean who is a great guy all around. So I have six family members who could easily step up. Not to mention a nephew, Brian, who I was close to for a really long time, albeit not so much now that life has intervened and become more complicated. Chris would have done it too, so 8 right there. Before I even get to 3-4 friend choices. And I considered three before deciding it just wasn’t going to fit right. So I did it sans Best Man.
But then I got creative. I asked Mike and Bill to make a toast for my father to give them a role, and had Bill get me the drink for the toast plus scripted Mike so he wouldn’t get inappropriate. Don was tagged as an usher at the church, along with a close friend and a cousin. My sister Sharon covered off her family with a speech to welcome Andrea to the family in lieu of my mother, my sister Marie and her daughters helped out with decorations and Mom wrangling. A nephew and niece agreed to take some extra photos to supplement the official photographer’s collection.
Drama happened anyway, but for the most part, I kept it at bay and didn’t engage. Not my problem to worry about.
But early on, my biggest worry was not the drama but the impact on my mother. This would not be the first family event since my father had died, but it would be the most prominent one for him to miss. And she would be coming alone, so to speak. I also knew that she would want to pay for stuff that she couldn’t afford to pay for, and so early on, I made the decision that has messed with my head a bit in the last few weeks.
I let her completely off the hook.
I wanted zero pressure on her. So I made sure that she didn’t worry about organising or paying for a rehearsal dinner. She and my sisters did a shower, and she put a lot of work into that, which in retrospect, I wish I had paid more attention to her role in. My one sister tends to take over anything she’s involved in, cutting out others and ignoring their input, but I wish I had had a few moments alone with her afterwards to just sit and decompress and to thank her for it. She had a bad day that day, and she didn’t want me to pry, but she had invited a man to come that she had been sort of seeing. And he flaked on her. He called to apologize and she let him have it. He was attempting some BS about forgetting or whatever and she cut him off at the knees and told him she never wanted to hear from him again. She was alone, and she was feeling the letdown. But it wasn’t an area her and I could ever share, nor would she want me to try, and I let her off the hook on it. Now, with Jacob, I see how he reacts to things and even if he doesn’t want to talk about it, I want him to know that I see his pain, I know some of what he’s going through. Even if he chooses not to talk about it, I want him to know. With my mom, I knew, and I think she knew, but I’m not sure. But that’s not quite the right issue either, mostly just additional context to how far I could go and/or didn’t.
As the summer progressed, I was so focused on making sure she wasn’t feeling pressured, I don’t think I ever stopped to figure out areas where she might have been feeling pressured anyway. She came up for the cake tasting to help choose a cake, which I thought she might like. I consulted her on my ring choices. I talked to her about ties a bit.
But as I was processing the wedding photo galleries in recent weeks, a thought occurred to me. Andrea, like most brides, had her hair done that morning. Along with her sister Becky (as maid of honour) and her mom. What did my mom do? Now, remember, my mom was no spring chicken at this point, she was 81 years old. So we weren’t wanting to tire her out in an otherwise long day, but it never occurred to Andrea or I to see if she wanted to be part of that “outing”. I’m sure she would have said no, but it bothers me it never occurred to me.
Equally, my sister was insisting that my mother had to have a new dress, and my mom was not interested. So my sister went ahead and bought two dresses anyway so she could try them on. I thought it was overkill, my mom didn’t want a new dress and she was 81yo. Pretty sure she could make up her own mind about that.
But could she? Did she say no because she was feeling “out of it”? Of course, the mother of the groom would normally get a new dress. Particularly if she doesn’t have others hanging in her closet ready to go. She had one from a year or two before, but certainly for any other wedding in the family, she got a new dress. For mine, I was basically telling her she could wear whatever she wanted, to take the pressure off, but maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I let her off the hook too much. She looked great, I loved her dress (one of the ones my sister suggested).
I got one thing right, at least sort of, anyway. When we were at the theatre, waiting for the event to start, and I was running around making sure everyone had what they needed — ushers, musicians, the Minister, greeting some guests — my mother was sitting for awhile by herself at the back of the theatre. I feel bad about something that happened that I didn’t do right.
Because I was the one getting married, I let my 5 siblings handle mom wrangling for the morning to get her to the theatre. I would look after getting her from the theatre to the picture taking, and from pictures to the boat, and one of the siblings would take her back to the hotel afterwards. It was covered, I didn’t have to worry about it.
But apparently, there was confusion at the hotel that morning. My mom was nervous walking over to the theatre (about 3 blocks), and being late, so she got ready early. She was in the lobby when one of my siblings came down to come over, and so she latched on for the escort and made it over to the theatre early. Unfortunately, my one sister had been planning on bringing her over and she didn’t know my mom left. So they were looking for her at the hotel, she wasn’t there, they were all freaking out, finally found out Mom had gone ahead, and she was ticked. After wrangling her, buying her a dress, getting her here, etc., my sister was pissed my mom was so ungrateful that she didn’t even tell them she was leaving to come without them. Frustrating, sure. I get it. Nerves, drama, blah blah blah. But she chose to lay into my mother about 15m before the wedding, with my mom sitting there by herself, feeling a bit lost, and thinking mostly about my late dad. I saw it and I did nothing. Not my church, not my pew, not my problem. Other people were wrangling my mother today.
Yet, of all the things in my life that could be a possible regret, however much I don’t believe in them, I regret that moment. I should have thrown down, kicked my sister’s ass to the curb and let her know, “No, on my wedding day, nobody gets to talk to my mother that way.” I know, I know, it was not my job to regulate their relationship, and my mother never needed my protection. She survived the Great Depression, WWII, had six kids and two miscarriages, buried almost all of her nine siblings, took care of her family, worked, and buried her husband. She had seen some shit in her life. My sister’s rant probably never raised a blip on her shit meter. But it bothered me. Even though I know that if I had reacted, my mom would have felt it was her fault for not waiting originally.
Anyway, I’ve thought about all of this before, then and since, and except for the hair or dress, all of those things were already known. But I missed an opportunity right after that event. Or more accurately, I didn’t take as much time with her as I should have. We went over to the side of the theatre, out of prying eyes, to have a small “us” moment.
She brushed my jacket with a lint brush, helped check my hair etc.. It was nice, but it was only one of three short moments we really had all day. In retrospect, I kind of wished I had an extra 30m in there to just sit and chat about nothing before the ceremony started instead of having to rush around. Maybe even, gasp, play a game of cribbage or something. Just a quiet ritual for the two of us.
Later, during the formal pictures, we did have a small moment while other shots were being taken where I gently mentioned Dad not being there, but we didn’t talk, just sort of stood there watching the photos being taken, and she squeezed my hand. I think, in part, that I was hoping she would open up about what she was feeling, but that wasn’t really our kind of relationship to discuss that in that way, at least not then. Closer to her death, perhaps, as our relationship changed, but not then.
Finally, during the dance, we had a short dance to the wedding song for her and my dad. “My truly, truly fair”. I’m not much of a dancer, but I will remember that dance almost as much as the first dance with my wife.
What the hell am I even talking about?
I’m not sure I know. Some of it is regret, to the extent I can even ever feel it. Some of it is loss for my mom, with a sense of missed opportunity. But most of what triggered this is the reality that I was consciously aware of the issues with my mom long before the wedding, and I planned in a way that would minimize the pressure on her. I actively managed things for the year so that she wouldn’t feel stressed that she needed to do something. I wanted her to just enjoy it, not feel like she had to “deliver” on anything. But in doing so, we missed opportunities that looking back, maybe we wouldn’t have missed if we, well mainly I, didn’t try to make things easier for her throughout the lead-up. Maybe I was trying to protect her from me when I should have been letting her have more of a role so she wouldn’t have felt disengaged if she even did.
I just find it odd that in hindsight, certain choices we didn’t even consider at the time now seem clear from a weird memory twig, rather than when they were fresh, when we were consciously in the moment, and when it went according to our original but incomplete plan. Huh.
Blogging is a strange world at times. Particularly for a personal site, where I try to embrace my inner muse and reveal what I’m thinking. Transparency is a regular mantra for me, with work, with personal relationships, with myself. And yet, when I’m feeling blah, I tend not to post about it because, well, I’m feeling blah about posting too.
This week I’m feeling a bit run down mentally, physically and emotionally. My leg has been giving me grief over the last few weeks, ever since it got infected. And while the infection seems to be gone, the resulting leg ulcer (if that’s the right term) remains. I am now officially part of “wound care”. But it’s not like I had surgery or was stabbed by a supervillain. I literally scraped my shin on a laundry basket and 4m later, the damn thing hasn’t healed properly.
Some of that is my weight, some is pre-diabetes (with the two obviously linked), and some is just the spot on my leg that I keep hitting it so it takes longer to heal as I age. Adding to the problem is that I have swelling in my legs. It seems to be venous, i.e, my veins are not doing an adequate job of pumping my blood back into my body. Weak calf muscles, I guess.
But the wound itself, and needing “wound care” is only a third of the problem. In and of itself, the need for wound care because it was gross and infected was basically that I didn’t take good enough care of the wound. I should have kept it covered better, washed and cleaned it better, put more anti-bacterial cream and stuff on it. And taken more care to avoid whacking it yet again. So that’s a small nudge to my self-esteem. I have no one to blame but myself and my own laziness. Stupid me, stupid leg, as I blogged previously.
However, on top of that, I had a problem last Friday. The previous three bandages I had on it were with a silver nitrate layer that helps sterilize the area and kill the infection. On Friday, they put on a new layer of stuff, and I didn’t really ask too many questions. I just thought it was a different layer of bandage. I was distracted by something else going on, but I’ll come to that in a minute. The short version is that the new bandage thing wasn’t likely to be a problem so I didn’t expect anything with it. However, as I posted on FB, it was an iodine layer designed to do the same as the silver layer had, except I tolerated the silver just fine. The iodine? Not so much.
It went on around 1:30 p.m., and by 6:00 p.m. I was going crazy. I took off a compression bandage that I thought was causing the problem and it lessened the issue for awhile. By 8:30, I was jumpy again. By 10:00 p.m., I would have considered amputation. That is not an exaggeration. I was considering a visit to the emergency room. What had started as a simple occasional twinge was up to 60 seconds of pain, 90 seconds of release and then another 60 seconds of pain again. Not like level 10 or anything, just a strong 6 or so. But it was constant and I couldn’t relieve it. I needed a solution, and I had no idea what the problem was. Finally I had to look at the wound, so I removed the bandage to find this brown “goop” that I no idea what it was (turns out it was the iodine patch). It didn’t look “normal” so I washed it off, took 2 advil and a sleep EZE pill, elevated the leg and tried to sleep. It was a bit more complicated than that, trying to wash it off while in a lot of pain and having NO idea what was going on with the wound, but we got it sorted out, and I slept. I kicked Andrea to the guest room because I thought the night would be hellish, but as it turned out, it wasn’t bad. I managed to sleep.
The next morning, I called the wound care clinic, and went in to see them after lunch. We decided it was the iodine patch as the pain went away afterwards, and so in hindsight, what I was feeling was essentially the equivalent of iodine being applied directly to the open wound every 60-90 seconds. It wound normally sting anyway, but after 8h of it, I couldn’t take anymore. If I was at a hospital, I would have been begging for a TENS unit (spelling? the thing they use instead of epidurals to disrupt the pain signals), some painkillers, or amputation. I had no idea what the cause was, I just needed it to stop.
Not my finest hour, dealing with the constant pain, and it’s left a residual taste in my mouth of self-disgust. Both in handling it as well as the original cause.
But what’s making me blah is that part of the challenge with the healing is that my lower legs are swollen. Weight, venous issues, pre-diabetes, take your pick, but I have excess fluid in my lower legs. There’s a simple solution of course, compression socks. I’ve used them before, it worked well, but it was never a huge problem and more out of inconvenience than anything, I stopped using them.
Well, now I basically need it again. And the part that is kicking my brain is that I will, in all likelihood, need them for life.
So if it gets warm in the summer, and I don’t wear them, my leg ulcer is likely to return as the leg swells. And I’ll end up back in wound care. Plus, if you don’t wear them for a while and your legs re-swell, the socks won’t easily fit and I’ll have to get separate wrapping to do it.
Maybe I’ll be able to lose some weight and I won’t need them; maybe I’ll be able to strengthen calf muscles. Maybe a genie will appear from a magic lamp and give me three wishes. Maybe things will improve, maybe they won’t. I can do a 1000 things to improve my life for other things, and it may make no difference for venous insufficiency, the current cause of my problem.
So.
Compression socks.
For life.
In the summer, when I’d like to wear shorts, etc. and not look or feel like an old man. I already have enough self-esteem issues that I feel uncomfortable wearing shorts lots of times, tend to prefer baggy sweat pants or regular pants, but comfort is also important, right? Apparently if I want to go swimming, I *can* take them off to do that, but afterwards, they should go on right away.
Or if I get careless for a few days, the legs will reswell and I’ll have to reset everything with separate wrapping to get the leg down to normal size so I can wear the custom socks.
Is it a big deal? Not really. Jacob deals with worse on a daily basis with his AFOs, and he has adjusted just fine. All I have to wear are simple socks, no major surgery required or anything, and yet it’s knocking my mental health back.
Some part of my reaction is simply mortality, one step closer to the great dirt nap. Some of it is simple ageing. Some of it is the embarrassment that I’ve declined to a point from which I can only partially recover. Some of it is February blah. Some of it is the pandemic isolation effect. Some of it is just me wallowing.
But much of it is just trying to wrap my head around the uncertainty of the future, what it will be like trying to go places where it will be warm and hot, where I’ll have to wear compression socks that I won’t be mature enough to want other people to know, and so I’ll likely have to wear pants instead of shorts. And, according to the nurse (who is admittedly a bit hard-core), likely for life.
Maybe it’s the current pandemic climate, a strange combination of massive change overall against a backdrop of ongoing “no change” day-to-day. Maybe it’s the fact that it is 1:30 a.m. in the morning and I’m still awake, and I’m choosing to type instead of drifting off to sleep. Maybe it’s that I’m sitting in a basement full of boxes around my new office setup, and I haven’t quite organized everything yet. Or maybe it’s simply the fact that I just finished watching S2 of Jessica Jones where much of her backstory was about feeling untethered in her world.
But untethered seems like a great word to me tonight. It isn’t about being unconnected, although there is an element of that. It is about being adrift, untethered to a True North sense of direction.
There is a phrase from the US Declaration of Independence about holding certain truths to be self-evident. And in our current pandemic world, some of those truths are not quite as firm as they might have been. Foundations are not quite as stable as we perhaps thought they were, or we live in more shades of grey than we originally thought.
And yet, as I hit the half-way point of the year, and thinking about things like goals and what I want to be doing with my time, I feel like much of it is about choice. As it always is, of course, with an act of choice, an act of free will even, being the most fundamental element of creating a new reality.
That each day we wake, we rise, and we start making more choices that shape our reality. And perhaps that’s the source of my unease. That my sense of “choice” has been missing from my repertoire.
I feel like life, in all its colours, is happening TO me these days rather than life being something I create with my choices.
And I need to reclaim it.
More importantly, I CHOOSE to reclaim it. I will choose which anchor points I to consider tethering myself to, even if only for a day.
And so, with that thought, I am going to commit myself to a daily choice. A daily affirmation of a life chosen, not life simply lived. And perhaps my choice is as simple as that…
Today I choose to choose.
Let’s see what I choose tomorrow. What are you choosing?
I have been thinking about friends, death and goals this past week, albeit not necessarily in that order. Our friend Jeremy passed away two weeks ago, a sudden death. An aortic aneurysm. One of those potentially “here one minute, gone the next” type medical events that can occur with no warning whatsoever. Inexplicable. It happened during the night while he was asleep. And today, June 24th, would have been his 50th birthday. This is not a pseudo eulogy or tribute to Jeremy, his story is not my story to tell, nor even attempt. I can only ever tell my story, and here are some of my thoughts and experiences from the last two weeks.
I don’t feel like I knew Jeremy as well as I should have or would have liked. I have been close friends with his wife for over 20 years, we met through work, I took a course from her father. I’m not the extroverted type to make and keep hundreds of friends, yet her and I have shared many a long night talking over the years. When Jeremy moved back to Ottawa, I was organizing the occasional “guys” nights for wings and ribs, and I got to know him better, as he would come out from time to time. We’d have a few laughs, talk about life, work, just some light fun for the night. We’ve also got together a few times as couples, etc.
But probably not often enough, apparently. Like most modern families, we all lead busy lives. Sometimes the schedule seems too full and you don’t make the time, thinking maybe we’ll get together one night next month. We would trade comments here and there on FaceBook, stay connected virtually, etc. And yet, even without having known him for much of his life, even without being best buds or anything, I find myself strongly impacted by the passing of a friend.
Since I feel no shame attached to tears, I readily admit that I cried when I heard the news. It didn’t seem like it could possibly be true. Jeremy died? Wait…that makes no sense, must be another Jeremy? Obviously not Aliza’s husband, that can’t be, they’ve been doing Lego together while in lockdown. They just went to Dow’s Lake to see tulips. It must be some cruel miscommunication. He wasn’t sick, was he? I saw nothing about him being sick, did I? The strange hops that brains make to deny unwelcome news.
But, no, it was terribly, horribly true. Nothing Covid-related, which people might “accept” as a random hand of fate but understandable, or a car accident, or a host of other things where your brain wants to somehow connect a rational explanation to the event and thereby help it process the news. Sudden inexplicable deaths of healthy 50-year-old men do not offer a pattern for my brain to easily accept. It probably also seemed even less real to me given that he was two years younger than me. Older is easier to fake-process; younger is not.
I was working the day I heard the news, an email from a mutual friend, and I had a lot of trouble concentrating afterwards. I was easily distracted, and often not even for things I could remember when I snapped back to the task at hand. Just with my mind gone for a moment. Or several moments.
After a death, I know most of us rely on rituals for both celebration and comfort. For everyone who knew him, the week after the news likely followed the normal patterns of shock, notifications, more shock. Of course, the rituals were, like everything else in our lives these days, transformed in a Covid world. A mutual friend summed it up nicely…”f***ing Covid”. We couldn’t all rush to our friend, his wife, and comfort her in person, no hugs could we offer, even knowing that nothing we offered would ease the pain, merely let her know we were pained by his loss and by her pain at his loss too.
The funeral by Zoom / Go Pro was odd but normal, unreal yet real at the same time, and I felt relatively fine during the service until my friend did her eulogy to mark his passing. Overall, I probably held it together less well than her, and when her voice wobbled near the end, I cracked and the tears came forth. I have done eulogies for my father and mother, lost it completely during my father’s and barely held it together for my mother’s. How she did it, I don’t know.
It also made me wonder horrible thoughts. Could I do one for my wife? Could I do one for my son? Would I even LET anyone else do that instead of me or would I feel it was my duty? I don’t know. There is a popular theory that doing the eulogy is a coping mechanism in and of itself, forcing your brain to accept the truth as you say the words out loud, as well as giving you something concrete to focus on. I understand the theory, and based on having done my parents’ eulogies, I think the theory was written by idiots who have never tried to eulogize someone.
My friend’s eulogy was brief, honest, raw, and brilliantly delivered. I felt honoured to hear it, to witness it, to see it, even if only virtually.
After the funeral, I took the rest of the day off work. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any work done, as I had struggled the first day, and I wonder if it was partly an added “stress” on top of the Covid isolation that helped “break” me. Well, bend me I guess is a better term. I knew I needed to take the time and I did. Time to breathe. Time to think. Time to grieve a little.
Two days later, we attended his Shiva service by Zoom again, and I felt more or less “fine” until after the service, when people in the chat room started sharing little stories and remembrances. The rawness in their voices was hard to hear, but an important ritual, I felt, to share and be part of for our friend, for his wife, for his parents, and for us too. Up until my friend’s aunt spoke and her raw emotion wiped me out. I felt almost claustrophobic and had to leave the room, leaving Andrea to finish the chat portion. I was just completely overwhelmed.
A few days later, we did a Shiva dinner by Facetime with Aliza and our mutual friend Vivian, and we chatted amiably for two hours. An almost “fun time”, except for the cause, and a reminder that there is nothing stopping us from doing that with anyone anytime. Virtual dinner parties and chatting, even if you can’t be together in person. To be honest, I’ve thought about that a lot…we could have done those WITH Jeremy beforehand, we all had 12 weeks of isolation where we could have done those types of dinners. We did them with family, why not more with friends? But we didn’t. Busy lives, I guess, and we weren’t being “innovative” enough on the social side the same way we are with family and work. F***ing COVID, indeed.
As I said above, I am not trying to tell Jeremy’s story, but if anyone wants to read Jeremy’s obituary, it is published online:
Obviously, I have been thinking a lot in the last couple of weeks about death and “what it all means”, as they say. One thing that keeps resonating with me is the idea that all deaths are personal. It’s such a multi-faceted phrase. Of course, for the deceased, it was uniquely personal…we all face death and experience death in our own way. Our own experiences and beliefs, our own rituals, our own circumstances.
I feel it is also uniquely personal for family and friends in that Jeremy represented something different to all of us.
And while it seems selfish, I feel most of us experience the death of others in uniquely personal ways too…not just our own beliefs and rituals, but in that we often think not simply of the loss of life, or the impact on his loved ones, but also selfishly, self-centredly, of the impact on ourselves.
It’s ironic, but shortly after learning of his death, I happened to catch a rerun of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s from the first season where Tasha Yar (one of the main characters) is killed during an away mission and Data (the android without emotion) hosts/organizes the memorial service. At its end, he asks the Captain if he “got it wrong” as he has never experienced the loss of a friend before and while he thought he would be thinking of her during the service, he found himself thinking of everything he would miss for him. So he wonders if he “got it wrong” somehow, while the Captain reassures him he got it “exactly right”.
I miss Jeremy’s laugh, knowing I won’t hear it again. His sense of humour, his obvious love for Aliza, his concern for others. He’s one of those guys you think of when someone talks about an “all-around, good guy”, the ones who improve your life just by being part of it. A mensch, as they said during the service.
And part of what affected me most, as it frequently does, is the narrative arc of someone’s life. For Jeremy and Aliza, it is a compelling story of early love, separation through time and distance, rediscovery, new beginnings, being together “at last”, getting married, getting his “new life” on track with work too, and the time they have enjoyed together in recent months while working from home.
It’s a strange way to think about it, a strange phrase unique to me and my own thoughts, but almost like “At last, he has his life where he wants it to be with most of the pieces figured out”. If it was a movie, Billy Crystal could play the lead and talk about either finding his “one thing” (after Jack Palance teaches him to herd cattle) or a co-lead with Meg Ryan where he gets to tell her that “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
A compelling narrative arc that resonates with me strongly. One analogy I saw online is like earlier investments are now paying rewards into retirement and hopefully old age.
And yet.
I feel like Jeremy didn’t get to reap enough of what he sowed. And that saddens me beyond belief. Maybe it’s the personal side again, not just his loss or missed “opportunity” to grow old with Aliza, but thoughts of my own mortality.
So my thoughts turn to the “personal side” for me. Selfishly, naturally, strangely, realistically. If I step back for a moment, I see a larger arc at play. I feel like I too have been on a journey of discovery in my life. Finding a groove with my father (around 23 or so), figuring out what I wanted to do for work (around 24 or so), finding out who I wanted to be around age 29-34, figuring out the basis for an adult relationship with my mom (around age 32 or so), figuring out what I wanted in a relationship around age 33, getting married at age 40, becoming a dad at age 41.
Equally, I try to live my life with what I consider a “no regret mentality”. For example, with my dad, I knew when I went away to law school that there was a not-insignificant chance that I would end up coming home for a funeral. My father’s health was not necessarily sustainable, and things happen even when you’re in good health. So before I left, I made sure to tell both my parents that I loved them so there would be no chance of not having said it and then having one of them die on me. Each week, for both parents, I would say it before I hung up the phone. And while it was easy for my mom to hear and say, it took a while for my dad to be able to respond too. But he got there. So when he passed, while it was sad, I had no regrets. We “ended” on the best terms I had ever had with him.
It was different but similar for my relationship with my mother. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye on stuff, but I made sure that I loved her for who she was, not who I might have wanted her to be at any given time. And I didn’t alter who I was to please her or spite her or anything else. I worked hard to treat her not only as my mother, but as the woman who was born before the Great Depression, who lived through it, who helped raise her siblings, who lived through WWII and lost siblings overseas. The woman who worked retail early on, had eight pregnancies and six kids, who buried her grandparents and parents, and most of her siblings, who outlived her husband by 17 years and found her own way. I have no regrets about how we got along, and there is nothing I would change. Maybe little things here and there, sure, but those are “rounding errors” on a relationship.
And with most of those “elements” in place, I have a pretty good life and I like where it is headed. If I had a magic wand, I might play with certain things, sure, but overall, I’m pretty fortunate with everything. I have more blessings than I can count, and yet, I don’t feel like I’m done reaping the rewards either.
I’ve often wondered with my son if I should record “just in case” videos, and Jeremy’s death makes me wonder again. Something to leave for Jacob, an extra legacy to leave behind if I should die before he’s old enough to understand most of it. To pass along anything of wisdom or thoughts that might help him in difficult moments in his life. To download everything I possibly could from my brain to give to him. Except that isn’t what he needs.
He needs memories of us doing things together. Like Lego. Or video games. Or puzzles. Or simply talking.
But with the passing of Jeremy, there are other things on my “to do” list that seem to be yearning. Heck, some weren’t even on my to-do list.
Thinking about friendship and goals
I am an analytical introvert by nature, and over the last few years and with the impact of Covid, I have let myself self-isolate somewhat socially. I modified some online tests and advice to create a “social connectivity” test, which I wrote about earlier this week. (A social connectivity test/)
I was surprised that my “nodal” number was 8-9 nodes. I thought it would be about 5. My wife maintains about 30, not including family. All of them I have seen more than once in the last two years, and I have actually done things with them at least once. Sure, most of the time it was meal-related. I was also a bit “relieved” to see that all of those friendships are ones that will survive my retirement in a few years. A friend noted that they can also be nurtured too through reconnection to expand the list, which is totally true, but it was meant more as a snapshot in time.
So whether it is Covid or the passing of Jeremy, I feel like I need to make more effort than I have. I don’t know what it looks like, but I need to get away from being on the computer by myself and “reach out” more.
I also find myself wanting to make sure I reap the rewards more while I can. Maybe that’s more time with Jacob, I still need to figure that out a bit more perhaps for the summer. I know it isn’t more time at work, that’s for sure. But I have three active siblings that I need to reach out more to as well.
I don’t know if that’s the lesson I should be learning, there are lots to choose from I suppose. But it is what I have been thinking about for the last two weeks. I don’t believe in regrets, but I wish I had learned the rest of Jeremy’s story from him before he died.
When my parents died, I comforted myself with an image of them doing something, a virtual “heaven” if you will where you get to repeat a moment in time seemingly endlessly or which simply doesn’t repeat but never ends either. For my dad, it was getting ready for a busy summer at the lake. For my mother, it was looking forward to having family around. For Jeremy? I suspect it would be something related to his relationship “at last” with Aliza. An almost John Keats-ish “Ode on a Grecian Urn” moment like the one captured on the Urn, a moment in time of two lovers about to kiss but not yet there:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Keats went darker, I know Jeremy would go lighter. The gaiety, the expectation about to be realized. The reward for his life finally being about to be “complete” beside Aliza. For many, people would see that as a groom waiting for a bride at the end of an aisle, but to me, it comes way before that, before the planning, before the decisions and options, before even an engagement. A point when you both know, “This is it. This is the plan. This is really going to happen now.” That moment when the brain explodes at all the possibilities to come.
I don’t know that anyone else shares my view of a possible afterlife, but for me, I find those images strangely comforting. Hopeful even.
I miss you Jeremy. Happy birthday, mensch. I hope I can learn from your example and honour your memory.
