The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Dark Milestone

I haven't been sleeping much recently. That's not so unusual for me, but this is worse than normal.

I'm focusing on some issues - things outside myself - while the rest of me makes adjustments and comes to terms... whatever any of that will end up meaning. This is am impromptu post - I'd thought about it repeatedly in the past couple days, but hadn't done any drafts. It's too personal a matter, and not something I want to even have anyone suggest is being played for attention. I will likely rant and will definitely ramble. The tears don't get farther than the keys.

My mom died Saturday night.

My reaction to even typing that line only reinforces what was already painfully obvious to me -- that I'm nowhere near ready to deal with people in real time, no matter how well-intentioned and sympathetic.

I've managed to hold myself together in dealing with siblings as we hash out the details, but a day likely won't help me prepare for dealing with the funeral services, the R.C. shaman's hollow words and the people. I don't even care much for people at happy events, and one or two of those who will almost certainly be showing up for this are people I would have (relatively) happily passed through the rest of life without seeing again.

These losses kill us a little each time, leaving us wounds that never really heal, just enclosing deep, lasting aches beneath scar tissue. We continue out of a mixture of regard for some of those who remain, habit and perhaps one's other passions of choice or matters of belief. Looking down the long road it's easy to consider that the longer we walk the path the more such losses and wounds we'll accumulate, and eventually they'll either take him out or at least gradually snuff out the desire to continue moving on towards the next bite of damage. I've seen too many people who ultimately reached a point where continuing to live was simply an effort, and they let go.

No, this isn't a pre-suicidal rambling. No worries on that score. If nothing else (and, believe me, there's more than this) I wouldn't deliver so terrible blow to my children. No, this is simple, garden-variety despair and existential angst. I am engaged in the timeless human activity of working through that which really cannot be worked through. We turn it over and over in our grasp until the pain becomes routine, we become numb to it and, probably worst and most dangerous of all, we become bored by the activity.

Please, no one suggest the works of Kübler-Ross or whatever published maven of hope or nugget of homespun wisdom or, worst of all, Biblical passage sustained you in such a time. I'm not buying any. Any salvation one doesn't make for himself is a sham. Otherwise I may as well go looking for Arthur Murray's Cha-Cha Your Way To Happiness. Okay, it probably doesn't exist, but it has marketability written all over it, no? The deluxe version might have huge fold-out sheets of paper with footprint diagrams on them. Some brilliant, future master of exhibition art will take dozens of the sheets and carefully place them over some third world minefields left over from various first world invasions and meddling.

Oh, and for the record, my use of salvation is of the strictly secular sort. Liberation from ignorance or illusion. Preservation from destruction or failure. If I ever start to "find Jesus" or otherwise lose my mind to some such happy horseshit delusion I hope someone will find a way to cure me or deliver a mercy killing. I don't find it out of line to regard religion as a contagious, conceptual relative of Alzheimer's.

In any event, I'm writing this in part for my own record and in part to inform some of the extremely small number of people who come by here that this is what has recently and is happening here. It is a Web Log, after all. Some of this was bound to creep in. If it's not to your taste there are various arrow and X symbols near the top of the page that are as good as doors, and chances are I didn't invite you here in the first place.

Back to the present, for now I'm grappling with it all, and when I can't, and also can't get my mind to turn off, I'm playing Phantom of the Lab. Both Sunday and Monday nights I've come in after dark, when everyone's gone home, to get some work done and leave small instructions for my able assistant. It gives me something familiar to process and complete and is a momentarily essential part of my glamour of significance, to wax sorcerous. Probably the last thing I need right now is to take in the message that I'm not really needed.

I have to be back out the door in a few hours, as we have a meeting this morning to make all of the Final Arrangements with the funeral home people and probably with a guy in a dress unless the merchants of death just handle the details in passing along the information to the local priest. I can't say that I'm sorry that I lack the experience in these matters.

It's an adventure, and as Roald Amundsen so succinctly observed, "Adventure is just bad planning."

Of course, if we do have to go deal with one of Rome's emissaries there's definitely some humor to be had in regarding our grief-worn quartet.

We all came into the game as Roman Catholics, but that's because they cheat at the game and sign you up before you can start thinking. Anyway, plenty of water's passed under that bridge.

The eldest, and by nature of her grace (again, I'm being secular here), good nature and saintly (watch it!) patience the one leading our efforts because no one else would object, is a Jehovah's Witness. Another is one of those semi-lapsed, buffet-style Catholics America is teeming with; creatures of habit and ritual, when it's convenient, and for whom a rosary is like an old, magically non-expiring AAA membership card to be fished out of an old purse or pocket in an emergency. One, well, one's simply delusional. (Yes, I know that's general trend here, but, O' the stories I could tell.., but not on a blog.) Finally there's me, the atheist, and I'll leave it to your own lights as whether or not to apply the "simply delusional" label here, too. I'm not here to tell anyone what to think. This is Ridicule. If you want an Argument that's the next door over.

In the end, though, we're united in wanting to carry through what we believe (and, fortunately, we've been in agreement on that) our mother's wishes were for how this is all to be handled. That should bother me on some level as I've long said that funerals are for the living - to provide comfort on one or more levels for those who are still alive. Still, believing that one's done the right and proper thing is a source of comfort, so I don't have to throw that one out.

I'd best try to get some sleep, though there is something to be said for a line from Fight Club: With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away, everything's a copy.

Like mentally wrapping a tv screen border around one's field of vision, or gently defocusing one's eyes, a lack of sleep can provide a sense of unreality - of distance and safety from a scene. Still, I shouldn't be courting that if I'm going to be shooting down the PA Turnpike during morning rush hour tomorrow, traveling mostly alongside poor wretches bound for Philadelphia or over the bridge into New Jersey. That's a desperate lot with not much to live for.

Ah, the Turnpike in the morning. Oh, what another fun aspect of the day to suddenly realize...