In all seriousness I’ve been feeling more and more somber the past few days. Since we made our plans to travel, the weight of the situation became all the more real. I’ve not exactly either been thrilled with the weather report that’s showing snow and windy conditions on both of the days we’re supposed travel. Tomorrow I drive up to my sister’s and my other sister drives down to her.
My other aunt has also made plans to come when we’re there. We’re hoping to be able to be a practical support for my aunt and uncle and cousin. The hospice nurse came yesterday to get everything started. You don’t consider when growing up how all these relationships are going to end. In all the moments adding up, you just know that they are family, and that these aunts of yours love you.
I spent the evening doing laundry and packing some of my bag. Classes start this week but I told one professor earlier I wouldn’t be there tomorrow and the one that was tonight I decided to skip at the last minute. I don’t know. I’m glad they’ve been so understanding. I do hope I get to come back and continue them. And so we all have made our plans. We’ll see what the Lord has in mind.
Over Christmas break I talked with my niece about the situation regarding what to call Casper. It was helpful talking to her. She and I were in agreement that Casper should be his name, but she could also understand my dilemma as I was clearly in the minority with the majority of family votes being cast for Dipstick. But something she said cleared everything up for me, so that my struggle and apprehension immediately vanished upon hearing her words. “You’ll just have to call him by his middle name,” she said.
So Casper is his middle name and that’s what I call him. He and Tom were in a fight during a walk today. I had sandals on and didn’t want to walk through the wet leaves but I did. Calling to them wasn’t doing anything. Cats will attack each other and bite each other to where some of them have had some pretty bad abscesses as a result of bite marks. I wanted to throw my glove at Tom, but he really wasn’t doing anything wrong either. They were being cats. I tried to get them mostly away from each other.
This afternoon I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. I was feeling bad that maybe I had spoken rashly about the book or been too hard in my judgements. The last third was probably my favorite and contained more of what I’d been wanting to read which was more personal commentary on the events of her life. If I get at least one memorable line from a book then I am usually happy. This one was found in the opening chapters. The rest of the book was fine, but no other lines topped this one.
This was in reference to her and her husband’s routine of walking every morning in New York City’s Central Park. She says, “We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park (p.36).” I thought this was a beautiful line that spoke to the individual nature of persons (having/liking different routes) yet acknowledges the action of love in concretely knowing another’s way and making the effort to find each other en route.
This was much more romantic to me than the reel I saw on Instagram that said maturing in marriage is realizing that nobody cuddles when falling asleep, and that instead, one partner snores while the other scrolls social media until their eyes get blurry. Not to bash someone else’s marriage or content creation or attempts at humor. Reels sometimes can really make me laugh. Lots of people commented that they actually do cuddle with their husband or wife before falling asleep. I was glad they did.
I started reading a book called The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s a memoir written by a woman following the sudden death of her husband who suffered cardiac arrest one evening while eating dinner. Simultaneously she writes about her daughter who has been near death in the ICU at least twice since the book started. I’m a little over halfway through and not really enjoying it, but I’m in with it now.
The book came recommended a while ago by another author–John Blase? He’s one of those writers, who at one time, could take away my breath by the things he would say. So naturally I am curious to what kinds of things he reads and what books he would recommend. I have bought multiple books over the years that he has liked and recommended and have never liked a single one. I don’t remember where I heard of it.
The Bible talks about those who grieve yet have no hope. From what I can tell, the magical thinking spoken of is referring to the things our minds do to try and make sense of terrible things and insulate us from things that are in the moment too comprehend. For the believer these things are filled in for us, or at least we have something to set our mind to in the gift of God’s word. Many people do not have this.
The book is made up mostly of the chronicling of events in that detached and emotionless way one does at times when writing about something considerably jarring. The front cover contains a review that states, “Stunning candor and piercing details…An indelible portrait of loss and grief.” I tend to think there’s way too much flattery in most book review blurbs, though it could just be me. I am hard to please with these things.
Two of my sisters and I made plans to fly to Florida next week to visit my aunt. The report from my cousin is one of rapid decline. I’ve been trying to process the situation, both on my own and with other family members. These events have a way of revealing odd family dynamics that you knew were there but hadn’t necessarily seen in a while. But they also have a way of bringing people together in ways that set aside differences.
My son has a birthday today, the one born on Epiphany. Miles and Graham are here at the moment. They all just set up the game Ticket to Ride. I think Miles is staying for supper and coming to church. My mother-in-law will be here as well. Tomorrow Josh is planning to take Ethan back to school and if we end up squeezing it in I still want to give him a haircut before he goes. Our present for my son arrived in the mail this afternoon.
Yesterday after pulling into the Hae’s parking lot I had a moment of needing to process emotions. Sometimes processing is just living through it, stopping when you need to and then continuing on. This is life in a fallen world where family members pass and the Lord’s divine allowances don’t always make sense to our finite minds. But the gift of loss contains a greater appreciation of the present, of hugs and games and brighter things.
Josh and I took the boys to school this morning. We’ve still been trying to do these coffee dates on Fridays. This is definitely one of those things where it’s the act of making something important that counts. The tea isn’t anything I couldn’t have at home. The idea of forcing yourself to do something used to sound so unromantic to me, and I wouldn’t even say it’s forcing yourself. It’s choosing everyday to live awake to what is truly important.
To where going to get coffee on Fridays because the no brainer and of course I am going to get coffee with you. On the way there I thought one of the boys looked sick or down or some kind of “off” to me. Something I’ve noticed with the younger kids is that I am sometimes not as quick to notice demeanors or moods. You just start to get used to people beginning to manage more for themselves and forget that there are others who still are in another stage.
So he ended up staying home and I made up a bed on the couch where he rested for a good majority of the day. I looked through assignments and tried to pull up a google doc to type out my list of everything that was due. My google storage was full and wouldn’t let me start new docs or edit an old one. My son went into my gmail and deleted a bunch of unread messages, so that freed up some space to where I had a little more again.
After supper Dad went down to check on the fire he’d made to burn old piles of firewood. He and the boys drove down in the truck. His dad donated his pickup truck to camp which has been nice because we were definitely in need of a better working vehicle. There was a broken green one that sat outside of our house for a couple of years. I felt like it blocked my open view of the skyline but it also didn’t seem like one of those things worth making a big deal about.
Laura came over for supper tonight. I said it was fine if she comes but he was going to have to help me clean today which he did. The other kids were back to school and dad was back to a normal day of work. Her mom texted me around 1:15 to let me know Laura was on her way and to thank me for having her. He’s been there the past two times and I think this is the last time they see each other before heading back to college. She wants to be a social worker.
Earlier this morning my aunt shared news that the doctors said there’s nothing else they can do for her treatments. We sort of knew this was coming but it didn’t make the news any easier to hear. I felt like I needed to take a minute to recalibrate my brain, and yes, my heart and my mind. I’m sure you can hear it when I write, the way my mind just kind of goes, without stopping to extract and absorb what I am needing from all of these various experiences.
I start to get this feeling like I’m on a horse that’s taken off and I don’t know how to slow it down. I was feeling anxious today about starting back with school and like maybe I just needed to drop one of my classes, like when you’re skiing and your feet start to spread apart too far. They need to come back closer together where I can have a better footing. I’m still in school. These other things come second to that which I’m in the middle of and committed to doing.
I feel like I said all kinds of stupid things yesterday. First of all, I am not going to read City of God. It’s too long. Second, I am perfectly aware that Lent has nothing to do with second chances at fasting and reorganizing your life, in that the point is not to be engaging in personal self-improvement projects or practicing spiritual disciplines in the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. I don’t even know if I said that right.
But I did buy the City of God book yesterday, along with another one. Next to Augustine was Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas. That one I could probably read. I tried to read Confessions earlier in the year and lost interest pretty quickly. Just in the very little of these two theologians that I’ve read, I think I like Thomas Aquinas better. So I used my Barnes and Noble gift card for two new books to add to our library.
I’m not scheduled for any more shifts until later next week. Last night I was able to come home early because they were short on summer day shift today. I asked if I could come back and work it and just reschedule my spring evening training for another time. So today it was me and one of the assistant directors of nursing who is responsible for filling in shifts during days when the floor staffing is short. I was glad she was there.
At some point I’m going to have to be able to do this on my own but I am definitely not at that point yet. She picked up a lot of my slack when it came to calling in orders and doing a monthly assessment on the hospice patient who I could not get to wake up to take her medicine. She came in there and was able to do it. I saw Laura’s dad who was there visiting one of his parishioners and thought of our parents on the drive home.
Tonight Dad wanted to take everyone out to dinner as an end of Christmas break/back-to-school acknowledgment. After that we walked around in a store called Sierra. He found some soap and I found a soft pair of wear around the house pants so I don’t have to wear out my green ones as fast. These ones are light pink. The boys found snowpants. I saw a pink 12lb kettlebell but decided that would not be necessary.
I made myself a giant pot of chicken and rice soup, with baked acorn squash mixed in to deepen the broth. I shared it with everyone yesterday, but they’ll move on to other things. It’ll last the next two to three days at least. This section of winter is one of my favorite stretches of time. With the holiday season now behind us, there’s the season between New Year’s and whenever Lent starts.
Then you have the slow climb out of the dark days, from Lent to Easter where you are given a second chance at fasting and reorganizing your life. By the time Easter comes it seems like years since Ash Wednesday, and people keep talking about spring finally arriving, when in fact it is only what some have called fake spring. It takes another six weeks for the weather to turn and become summer.
The kids slept in until almost eleven today. Dad was up early but fell back asleep on the couch while reading. Even the early birds can’t ignore nature’s cues, though they’ll be back by mid-February. I told him I like when he sleeps in, but I don’t remember when I woke up. We didn’t have Augustine’s City of God. They had it at Barnes and Noble so I might try and stop by on my way over to work on Spring.
There’s nothing very inspiring about pictures with grey skies. I took this one while out for my second or third walk when I thought I better take a picture of something before the sun goes down. There have actually been two separate groups in the CGC over New Year’s weekend. The first was here leading up to New Year’s Eve and the second was here on the actual night. Tonight the camp kids are down in the dining hall and plan on staying over night at main camp. They usually have some sort of reunion over break.
Everyone had a nice night ringing in the new year. I was asleep, but I think that still counts. I really think years are going by faster now, as it seems as though we were not all that long ago beginning another year in January. I feel like gradually I’ve become less reflective over new year’s time. I did make sure to buy a new calendar and new journal. The past three years I’ve filled four composition notebooks with notes and entries. This latest one took about a year.
I set a goal for 8,000 daily steps. It doesn’t hurt to set them. Other than that I don’t have much I’m thinking about in that regard. I would like to do less Instagram scrolling and more actual reading. Fiction, memoirs, church fathers, something other than stupid fluff. I’ve kind of just allowed my mind to be numbed and entertained and while I’m sure that has it’s place I do miss the sharpness that comes with reading other things. My eyes have started changing too where you have to hold out the bulletin or book just to see it.
I made the boys clean today. They’re pretty good about it usually. It’s not their favorite thing to do by any means, but after making them breakfast I was hit with the urge to start cleaning the kitchen, the kind where you somehow end up with three or more garbage bags full of food and old supplements and expired meds from 2018 that you thought you’d keep around in case you needed prescription-strength pain medicine.
And instead of 16 cans of bug spray I narrowed it down to more like 8. We end up with a lot of bug spray around here especially in the summer. There are separate kinds for gnats and ticks because what keeps away gnats doesn’t always keep away the mosquitos. The cats have their own pharmacy section in the cupboard and I got rid of their anxiety medication and antibiotics but kept the dewormer. I also kept their allergy eye cream.
So that felt nice to clear out some more space. The rug underneath the table that I was so wonderfully proud of was taken out to the dumpster. I go through these periods where I’m given this almost cold unattachment to things in whatever space has called for me to address it. They emptied out jars and burned boxes and moved the chairs from here to there. I enjoyed their company and was pleased with the results.
