The defenestration of blog

I haven’t written for a long time. I’ve been overwhelmed with all of the normal things that surround the death of a loved one, particularly when you’re responsible for figuring out accounts, calling debtors, selling a home, and managing grief all at once. But another unexpected death has caught me off guard, and got me wondering: how young is too young to die?

We say it often, commenting on how sad the loss is, perhaps because age is so typically correlated with probability of death. My grandmother was 73 when she passed away, my mom 56. I’ve known people who died in their teens, their thirties, and their nineties.

I’m inexplicably outraged sometimes when others suffer a loss like this, when another event begins to occupy the space that for me is so explicitly reserved for grieving my mom. Have you forgotten? I want to say. Because for those close to a tragedy, it remains raw and painful, seemingly forever.

I feel that I’m perceived as obsessed with the morbid. I’d rather not be, but it’s hard to escape when reality drags me back to it.

Saying goodbye is hard.

Saying goodbye to 2017 is less hard.

This was a year of extremes. It was a year of firsts and lasts, and loss that I still cannot even begin to accept.

I performed in my first stage production, Beauty and the Beast. This was the first broadway tour I ever saw as a child, watching through binoculars from the highest of balcony seats with my mom and grandpa. It was magic. It still is, every time I see it. It was magic to be on stage as a dancing plate and angry townsperson. It was magic to hear my mom laughing (cackling?) as I crouched in front of her and did what can only be described as a much better choreographed version of the Macarena.

I sang on stages, at parties, at sessions, and learned so much about what it is to be a musician. I was officially hired on as an employee with the Center for Irish Music, and feel happier there than I ever have at a day-job.

I wrote nearly 80,000 words of a novel, worked on short stories, and discovered new writers who inspire and challenge me as an artist.

I spent so many hours sitting in the afternoon sun and gardening and meeting my mom for walks and iced tea and long conversations.

I got to take my mom on an incredible trip to the Cinque Terre and Turin and Thun and Milan, where we laughed (a lot) and cried (a little less) and where she managed to drag her still-recovering-from-major-surgery body up mountains and through little towns and on tour buses. I’m so grateful for trip that when I think about it, I can’t breathe.

I made wonderful new friends and made memories with old friends (including a trip to Quebec that left me envious of a society that seems to actually value artists).

But…

It was also the year I was fucked over by my great uncle and aunt, who sold our family cabin in Two Harbors out from under us. This was the cabin my great grandmother gave them on the condition that they keep it in the family. It was a place where I spent so much of my childhood, where my mom spent so much of her childhood. They sold it without even consulting us, knowing that we wanted to buy it from them one day, and they did it solely for the money. They claim to be Christian, so I’m pretty stoked about the idea of them rotting in hell (whoops, was that mean?).

I was shocked and saddened and angered by politics and world events. I was (and still am) terrified for those people who have no safety net (or whose safety net could be torn away from them at any moment).

I was hospitalized for a neurological event that I still don’t understand, which left me exhausted and made me sleep when I should have been spending time with my mom as she struggled through chemo.

I was lied to by doctors who, at the end of my mom’s chemo journey, told us that it would be a matter of months without further surgery. Flash forward to just three weeks later, when we were struggling to keep her comfortable for those brief few days that felt like a torturous eternity in home hospice care.

I had a hard birthday and an even harder Christmas. I got sick and threw my back out for the first time and wanted more than anything to call her and cry on the phone. I biopsied a thyroid nodule that was half the size of my entire thyroid, and still don’t know if I will need to get it removed.

I’m so thoroughly beaten down and exhausted that it’s sometimes hard to keep going.

I would say that I’m looking forward to a new year and a fresh start, but I honestly can’t imagine what my life will look like without my mom/best friend/favorite person. It’s hard to get excited about the prospect of finishing my book or performing  or finding any sort of success without her there to celebrate with me.

So I’m hoping. I’m hoping with all of my heart that things will get better. That life will get easier. That the world will be kinder. It’s all I can do right now.

Maybe I’m a terrible person. If I am, it’s not of much consequence right now. Not when I’m struggling just to breathe.

My general attitude shifts between anger, sadness, hopelessness, and unadulterated anxiety. But most often, anger. I’m filled with hostility towards just about everything. Facebook posts of people enjoying time with their parents (or god forbid, grandparents). Celebrations of illnesses that have been overcome.  The grief of people who have lost a family member over the age of 80. Happy people.

I’m going to take a moment to be self-indulgent and throw myself a pity party. Since kindergarten, I’ve lost three great-grandparents, a great aunt and uncle, cousins, two grandparents, a beloved pet, and of course, my mom. Among these are immense, life-changing,  PTSD-inducing losses. Many died much too young, of accidents or disease. Keep in mind that this is just on one side of my family, since I never really knew my dad’s side. In the midst of this, there were also untold illnesses and hospital visits, many of which vastly changed the way my family lived and operated on a daily basis. All of this combined to create an ever-present anxiety, a very real fear that every phone call is one of *those* phone calls, that every goodbye is the last.

Then, of course, there have been other anger and grief-inducing  losses. \ But that’s for another time.

Why do some of us seem to face loss so constantly and so thoroughly? Sure, we all have our struggles and demons. I know that. But it’s hard to equate the two when others’ challenges can seem so trivial…