Posts Tagged → loss

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

It wasn’t a funeral technically we didn’t have a funeral it was an inurnment which I learned is different than an interment

Here are some words I did say at my father’s funeral:

…everything good that I am is thanks to you. I am living and pursuing happiness in a foreign land, a thing that I have always dreamed of doing and a thing in which I find exceptional value and strength. If I wouldn’t have had you, if I wouldn’t have had Mom, none of this would have been possible. If we are to count our blessings then this is the first and perhaps greatest of mine.

Yeah, it was a little sappy.

Neither of my brothers were particularly jazzed about the idea of saying something at Dad’s gravesite, so I had a little speech typed out and in my coat pocket. I won’t put all of it here on the blog, but the whole thing was about how ineffective words are at explaining loss.

The speech ended with me yelling, “Kakaw!” at all the nice folks at our small grave-side gathering. Sarah’s part was to reply by hollering, “Aye-aye-aye!” like a member of a mariachi band. (It made sense in context.)

Dad would’ve liked that.

They always had chicken tenders and they weren’t great but they were hot and ready when a lot of other things weren’t

When someone you love is slowly dying, one thing no one really tells you about is just how much goddamned sitting around you have to do. Something like 75% of the whole shebang is time spent just sitting in a chair in a little room with the people you care about waiting for something bad to happen.

The other 25% of it is, based on my experience, forgetting to eat and then running down to the hostpital cafeteria before it closes to see if there are any chicken tenders left.

Anywho, there were a bunch of times in that room when I’d look up as if suddenly coming awake and see that, of the six or seven people squeezed in to be at Dad’s bedside, all of us were looking at our phones. Everyone except Dad, of course, who was busy with other matters.

It was surreal and … kind of horrifying. A definite, “My God, what have we become?” sort of moment.

I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or blaming anybody or any of that jazz. It’s just that I’m a teacher and I spend a lot of my day fighting to keep people off their phones so they can get some work done. These days, I have a sort-of conditioned response to seeing a room full of lowered heads and a bunch of tiny, glowing rectangles. I see how f*ing insidious our cellular masters are. I get angry about it.

In that room with Dad, I’d purposefully put my phone away and just sit. Not the whole time, but every now and again, when the urge hit me. It wasn’t meditation, but something akin to it, when I’d pick a sound or something and try to focus on it and just … exist in that room. Sometimes I counted seconds, sometimes I counted breaths, sometimes I counted the number of times the IV Dad was hooked up to made its little pumping noise. (It had to pump 4,000 times to go through one bag of IV fluid.)

Was it worth doing? Trying to “be in the moment” rather than scrolling? F*ck, I don’t know. It was hard not to be nihilistic or fatalistic when Dad was dying right there, to say to myself, “What is the point of anything?” and then mindlessly swipe through TikTok or Reddit. Take comfort where you can find it, right?

There have definitely been times when I’ve thought that the sort of distractions phones can give was a comfort. A blessing, even.

But we all know better.

The New Normal and words that I probably won’t say at my father’s funeral

My dad died early in the morning on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026.

What had started out as a trip to the E.R. for abdominal pain spiraled into more and more problems until, eventually, the cancer was just too much for his system.

It feels too personal to go into details, but my memory hasn’t been … working the way it should for the past few days. All of us were by Dad’s side right up until the end and everything has turned into this blur of nurses and doctors and hospice reps and phone calls and late-night drives and texts and chicken fingers from the hospital cafeteria and, at some point, my brain said, “You know what? I need a break. We’re going to shut down some non-essential functions.”

And so, my writing about all this is a way of helping my poor brain keep track of events.

(I can’t believe I’m still doing doodles for a post like this)

My brother has told me a couple times in the last few days that he doesn’t think it’s really “hit” him yet.

I’ve responded both times by asking, “How do you think it’ll ‘hit’ you? Like, what do you anticipate will happen when it does?” Because that’s what a therapist would ask — it’s a leading question to help you understand that you’re not tied to any tracks; there’s no steam train about to run you down. You’re having a trauma response that makes you feel like there’s an immanent threat, but really there isn’t.

(Today’s armchair psychologist’s report is brought to you by: Years and Years of Teaching Seminars!)

My brother says he doesn’t know what it’ll feel like when it hits. I think the whole “hitting” thing is a myth.

Or, I should say, I’m not as worried about getting hit as I am worried about “The New Normal.”

What I think happens when you go through a traumatic event like this is your brain slowly starts incorporating new, bad habits that result from the trauma and/or getting rid of good habits you may have once had. If you’re not careful, those temporary habits become actual full-time habits when maybe you don’t want them to and all those good habits you once had are gone forever.

Like, right now, there’s no way I’d be able to go out and do fun stuff. I absolutely don’t feel like it. If a friend called and asked, “Hey, do you want to play board games or go to a concert or see a movie?” I’d probably respond (internally) with, “No way! I’m too sad to do that. I want to stay home and watch A Relaxing Walk Across Skyrim and take a nap for the fourth time today.”

That’s a big, obvious example and I’m sure you think, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I can see that.” But how many tiny and seemingly-innocuous habits are there that I’m losing or gaining?

For example, at one point in the last week (although the specific day escapes me), I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth in two days. I had similar realizations at other times along the lines of, I haven’t had any food since breakfast yesterday. And When was the last time I showered? Christ. I don’t remember.

And mental habits! I don’t even know how many times I’ve told myself, “I am not going to think about that right now. I’m just not even going to consider that particular problem right f*cking now.” It could be a bill or an email I have to send or the question of what to with my father’s collection of erotic sculptures from across 6 continents. I will just shove it aside like a passenger on a Japanese train, without so much as a care, and continue on about the business of being miserable.

That’s what I think happens to you when someone you love dies; They leave a hole, and a big part of that hole are the habits — physical and mental — that keep you happy and healthy. Your sadness becomes a part of “The New Normal” and you’re left just being … worse.

Sigh. This is not at all what I intended to blog about when I started.

Whatever. I’m still here. Still typing.

I’m just saying that even if I donated the money don’t put my name on it bad stuff happens in there so just call it something else please

The city of Lincoln waits for you like a big red splotch, as if a great glob of glued-together Republicans fell from the sky and splattered over dozens of square miles of pasture at the heart of the Great Plains. They spread out, repopulated, all started building. First, ranch-style homes. Next, steak houses.

The fact that the University of Nebraska (arguably the most liberal spot in the state) is in Lincoln is only redeemed in the eyes of the citizenry by the Cornhuskers, the perennial disappointment of a football team with an inexplicably avid fan base.

In the far south of Lincoln is where you’ll find the April Sampson Cancer Center, which I can only describe as a cathedral to the gods of malignant tumors. It is massive and modern and all made of glass and marble. The foyer is tall. It looks like it was pulled out of a mega church, or maybe a bank, because right off to the side there are a bunch of partitioned desks where the administrative sides of things are handled. (That’s where they tell you your insurance doesn’t cover it. That’s where they tell you you’re bankrupt.)

There are a fleet of wheelchairs just inside the entrance and whole building is dedicated to cancer and, boy, do I hate it. I mean, I’m glad it’s here and I appreciate all the doctors and nurses and support staff. Everyone is so nice. They bake cookies every day and go around passing them out. There are player pianos and a cafe where the worker is quick to tell you about the free refills. There’s a whole path out back where you can walk around when the weather is nice. It has a water feature. It’s as pleasant of a “cancer building” as one could ask for. But I hate the fact that this building even exists.

I’m not a conspiracy theory sort of person, but there are a couple of things that I think are true:

  1. American car companies and the oil industry conspire and bribe the government to disincentivize small, cheap electric vehicles.
  2. There are people in the medical and insurance industries who would happily inject every American with poison if it meant they could squeeze another dollar out of one needy schmuck.  

I get the feeling that whoever built the April Sampson Cancer Center, whoever is profiting from it, considers the whole outside world to be one big waiting room and all of us peons are just cancer patients in the making. Waiting in the wings for our chance in the radioactive spotlight.

It’s pessimistic. Probably not the thing to focus on. Today, however, I am filled with dark images that occupy my mind like belligerent apartment tenants who refuse to vacate.

(When the pain got really bad, Dad’s hand seemed to rise up of its own accord. It hovered a few inches in the air. I recognized the motion. His fingers felt and fumbled with the hem of his shirt and then with the thin layer of tissue paper that covered the exam table. It was a restrained, delicate touch, but his hand didn’t find whatever it was looking for. Maybe a pocket, maybe a person, but nothing. Then his hand paused for a moment against his stomach and fell back down to the exam table, suddenly and quietly deflated.)