Today is Friday, August 14. The San Marcos Daily Record office is closing its doors. Word is, the press will be melted down for scrap. After all we went through, after my Mom died delivering newspapers printed on that hulking behemoth, its legacy ends.
Sunday, August 16 will be six months since my Mom died.
Monday, August 17, my Dad will have what we hope will be the last heart surgery – an implanted defibrillator that will keep his heartbeat in normal rhythm.
It’s been six months since my Mom died. Six months. How the hell can that be? Why didn’t time stop? I still can’t make sense of it. I said I was going to chronicle my therapy journey even before my Mom’s passing, but I have failed. I wrote 45,000 words of a gay romcom, but around 1,500 about grief.
I’m sitting here at Wake the Dead with Parker. He’s working on his Superhero D&D campaign; I’m supposed to be editing my 45K romcom. I’m having lunch this afternoon with one of my former Daily Record colleagues, someone who has been a dear friend for the last 20 years. She was a friend to my Mom for all that time, and she’s feeling the loss of the Record even more profoundly today.
I know that things end. I know they die. How do I move on from this? Do I even want to?
In 2024, I had made up my mind to give up. Me, the person who vowed to never give up, kept coming up against the question, Why not? Why not give up? What are you working so hard for when it’s all going to end anyway?
In answer to that question, I made a plan, an exit strategy, and I almost acted on it. Depression found me in a dark place, and I was thinking perhaps it would be better to let it take me before things got bad again, because they would get bad again. And they did.
Thank the connectedness of the Universe that I asked for help. Jason and I sat at our favorite restaurant, and I asked him what it would mean for our lives if I never got better? What if this is the best there is? What if I will never be that person I could have been? What if, after all, I am too broken to keep on?
He told me he loves me and that it would be okay. No matter what, we would be fine. That comforted me so much. And it meant I could give up but not give in. I could finally rest and be me. I could find sanctuary in the relationships around me.
I picture us at the base of a massive tree with wide branches crowned with leaves. All above us, a storm rages, but we huddle together at the tree’s roots, safe and warm in each other’s arms.
While we’re here in this soft, safe place, I’ve been pulling out the shrapnel from all my past wounds. Finally getting that poison out. That’s an excruciating process, and there are many days — especially lately — where I wonder if there’s any point to that? What good will it do when the scars already exist, and is there ever really an end for that kind of healing?
What has followed has been a soft, formless meandering. I no longer possess the driving mania that I had before that depressive break, the thing that compelled me to GO GO GO because I didn’t know when I would have the energy to get up and move again when I inevitably slipped back into depression. It has burned out of me, like a fever or a fearsome dream.
Still I wonder if I was better off before. I had a direction. I had a point to drive toward. Maybe I gave myself a break.
Maybe this is what Buddhism means when it says you’ve reached enlightenment when you no longer feel such deep attachment to the world? Is that what’s happening, or is it grief? Am I self-soothing by withdrawing because my heart is just too broken to deal with the cruelty of this world?
I don’t know. I still feel things too deeply. I’m still overly sensitive and get ridiculously hurt when I witness people’s heartlessness toward each other.
I hate how fickle people are. I hate how they will turn on one another so quickly. I hate that my trust in people was so misplaced for so long. How could I believe in the benevolence of humanity when I suffered so much at the hands of selfish, cruel people?
Maybe that’s it right there. Maybe I have finally given up on people.
Ugh, that fucking hurts.
I’m not saying that I give up on all people. I’m lucky to have truly decent human beings around me. But I have learned to cut ties with the ones who reveal themselves to be unkind. The ones who exclude and judge, who hurt others for personal gain… Maybe it’s a good thing that I can now be so discerning.
So this year I lost my Mom, but in the last four years, I lost my hope for humanity.
We really are doomed, and we really do deserve it.
In the end, we all die anyway, so I’m going to focus all the love in my broken heart on the ones around me who deserve it.