Entry 3: The losses accumulate

This may be quick and it may be less than artful. I don’t really want to write. My brain is sludgy. However, I don’t want to let this blog wither, and there are sad things afoot.

Last Wednesday, after several days of worry and unanswered messages, my husband found out that a lifelong friend of his had died. M lived alone in a European city and worked in an academic field. He had a strong research presence but no connection to an American university and was essentially a contract researcher who worked out of his home for a European scientific institute. Because M had not updated his emergency contact information for his employer, when he was found dead in his apartment (unclear on how long he had been there), no one knew how to contact his family. It was only through my husband’s outreach to the consulate that anyone in M’s extended personal network found out about his death.

My husband and I are getting older, I know, and losses increase as time goes on. But I think of the small crew of humans we are connected to in this life, family members, childhood friends, former coworkers, friendships formed in person or across the ineffable electronic pulses of the internet. Over time those connections disappear. It all feels so unfair, not just for M and his family, friends, and colleagues, but for my husband, too, who has lost all his immediate family and now his closest friend.

And the world continues to burn. In the face of all of it, focusing on our connections to one another feels like an antidote to despair.

Entry 2: To drift

Trees in the wind outside my bedroom, 4 February 2024, a year ago.

OK. So maybe it wasn’t norovirus after all. And I thought it was getting better, but…

Tuesday, after days of malaise, zero appetite, a fever, and pain increasingly located in the “lower right quadrant” of my abdomen, I went to urgent care. Urgent care sent me to the emergency room. Tuesday was sheets of rain weather in San Francisco, the most rain that has fallen in the city in over 130 years. All around was flood and tree limbs bent in the wind, puddled intersections and inside-out umbrellas. Lucky for me, the city is also bounteous with hospitals. Since we are relatively new here, my husband and I sat in the car and read emergency room Yelp reviews before making our choice, adding a particularly ridiculous and random feel to the day. We picked a well-regarded emergency room that wasn’t that far from our house and set off on our appendix adventure through rain, wind, and worry.

The day is fuzzy to me now. Triage. Waiting. Hearing the moans and pains of others. Since I was only in real pain when I moved or someone poked me in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen, nothing felt particularly urgent to me about my situation. I was wheeled off for a CT scan, where the fellas were surprised that I did not have an IV, billed as an integral part of the contrast imaging process. One failed attempt at an IV later, we went for a “no contrast” scan. I was in surgery to remove my appendix laparoscopically a few hours later (with an IV despite my “wiggly” vein). Luckily, my appendix was not perforated, so the procedure was straightforward, with no complications. I spent the night in the hospital.

I am fatigued. Grateful we went to the hospital and to have medical care. In some ways happy to be distracted by something so basic, and to be able to take days off from work to recover (though I also don’t get paid for time off and am concerned about the effect of unexpected time off on clients). I have thoughts about the chaos of hospitals, where there is too much going on, no one has what they need to sleep uninterrupted, and there is a feeling of being more of an object, a problem, and less of a person. I wonder about those years of intermittent stomach problems that I had, which I now suspect might have been recurrent appendicitis. I learned that there may be a genetic component to appendicitis and remember my dad’s story about getting his appendix out in the first semester of his freshman year of college. I wonder about that connection, so close to the eighth anniversary of his death. I tear up with grief and despair for the way things are right now, nationally, globally, environmentally.

Why not welcome the fatigue, the excuse to rest and take space, to hole up on another rainy day and watch the magnolia outside, in full bloom in February, sway in the winter wind, to drifit in and out of sleep?

Entry 1

I became sick on Tuesday night, up at 2am, thinking it was the same old same old, the stomach issues I’ve had since childhood, brought on by stress or hormones or stray grains of wheat lodged in my gut. Usually a double-dose of ibuprofen knocks out the pain. Not this time. I’ll spare you the details, but it appears I had the norovirus, which mainly just made me feel absolutely terrible without any way to fix it.

It also brought me 24 hours of glorious quiet. Without the patience or ability to focus (on the news, on social media, on books, on myself), all I had was the sweetness of extended quiet suffering, falling in and out of fitful sleep punctuated by the occasional irritation of retching (thank you, husband, for attending to my retching bowl). Unable to make conversation, I was given a pass on interaction. Even the cats avoided me until I became semi-upright about twelve hours in.

My phone was on another floor, so the never-ending buzz of texts and spam voicemail notifications were silenced. My Apple Watch lay on its charger, its haptics and constant measurement of my movements on pause. When I did flip open my laptop, the stream of information overwhelmed me. News, Facebook (ugh), Instagram, Bluesky (a different kind of ugh), all designed to interrupt, to distract, to work on the most basic of emotions. No wonder my thinking process is so disjointed. The mind needs time to be free. The writing mind. The emotional mind. The connected mind.

I’m making a commitment to writing something messy and of the moment in this blog on the regular (what does on the regular mean? More than once a week. I could be ambitious and try writing daily, but I don’t want to feel trapped by it). It’s been a year since I last wrote. I doubt anyone is reading or eagerly awaiting my deep thoughts. But I have to get back into this process again. I have to get the words flowing. So much goes on in this mind of mine, when I let it go free, that I would like to get onto the screen. Even if no one reads it.

And these are very sad, disconnected, interrupted, overwhelming times. There are many ways to fight tyranny, to say free inside your mind, to be in community with others. So, Internet Void, there you have it. I’m going to write like it’s two thousand and five. Low expectations, high word count, here for no one but me. Let’s just hope I’m not feeding AI.

In the gloaming

I’m not sure when I’ll get it back, the urge to write, the desire to create (anything). The last year has been confusing. I’m like a dulled version of myself, no controversy, no spark, no spirit. Also no direct pain caused to others. Can I be myself and not cause pain? Can I have passionate opinions without hurting others? Take creative risks? Stop writing about my arid mind?

Perhaps none of this makes sense. I’m not spelling it out.

In a few weeks, we will leave this house, this container for family life, this land of the dead. Versions of us lurk in the corners. They are packed in boxes that we leave out by the curb, pieces of self strangers rifle through, wanting something for free. This is the place where I became a writer, the place where I stopped writing. This is where I drank and yelled, where silences hid pain. Pets lived here, got sick here, are buried here. A brother died here.

We’ve celebrated 18 Christmases in this house. The boy went from toddler to registered voter in a matter of moments. From where I sit, I can see his graffiti sharpied on the fireplace brickwork, the kindergarten scribbles of a boy who had just learned how to write his name. At this moment, he is upstairs. Tomorrow at this time, he’ll be on a plane back to college, while his dad and I will at the other house, hanging curtains, prepping rooms, because on Sunday my mother arrives. One person leaves, another slots into place.

And maybe in six months, my creative mind will return, fed by change and urban breezes.

Transfiguration

I’m not sure what this space is anymore, or who I will be in a month, a year, a season. My creativity is dead. Missing. On a long hiatus. I blame death, the vagaries of aging, the imminent departure of the boy, who will not be in this house by this time next week.

I’ve followed the rule of threes for 18 years now. We’re whittling it down to two, then one, then none. The fall will be confusing and chaotic. Rebirth, reinvention, is mandatory. On optimistic days, I see the changes ahead as an opportunity to reconnect with the parts of myself I have allowed to atrophy. Who am I at my core? More than a mother. More than a partner. I am an uneasy friend. An absent artist. A professional drone.

It’s not just the pulls of home responsibilities that have worn me down. It’s the job, all grays and softness, where my only viewpoint is one of support and compassion, a supposed expert in the ways of the mind and heart. In addition to ruining me for anything but silence and depth (I barely have the energy or patience to maintain most friendships and family relationships outside of an increasingly shrinking circle), it has made it difficult for me to adopt the necessary clarity of a writer. How can anyone be fairly summed up in a few pithy sentences? How could I dare speculate about the complexities of another human’s psyche? We are large and contain multitudes. Words are powerful. They illuminate my experience. But my words can box others in, remove their subjectivity.

To survive, I have to shake this mindset off, fling it out of my system. I have to have faith that there is something left in me worth sharing. On the positive side, I’ve been inhaling books of all kinds. That has to count for something, the ingestion of other peoples’ metaphors, their worlds, their beautiful, complex simplicity.