dragonlady7

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sonnetsandswingouts https://sonnetsandswingouts.tumblr.com/ said:

I hate when non-immediate people are more upset than I am, and then I end up having to manage their grief instead of actually being supported…anyways, I’m glad you were able to make it out to the family as well as getting a little normalcy.

Ah, thanks– yeah, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t have come. I was not doing great sitting at home at a distance. And I really did need to see MM’s family too. She said, on Christmas, between suffering through various Zoom calls, “I can’t wait to see my real family tomorrow,” and she meant me and Dude. 😭 It’s– it’s important. I’m glad we were able to satisfy everyone as to COVID protocols– and it is still a small risk and I’m reading all the Living Room Transmission horror stories, but. DF is starting the vaccine, those kids’ school system has one of the better testing programs I’ve seen, and they don’t have a nanny or babysitters or anyone, and since their family’s not local they aren’t even having the potential Grandma-didn’t-tell-anyone-she-was-still-going-to-Bingo kinds of leaks. And ArmySister got a negative COVID test before she came up, which– you can’t get tests so easily in NYS, but Maryland has them, and she’s done four so far. (They’re getting less gentle with the nose swabs, she said a little glumly, but was grateful she could get one anyway.) It could still turn into a horror story but the likelihood is lower, and we’re all– well, the stakes are lower because there’s now nothing more that could happen to our vulnerable patriarch. [Don’t think I don’t know that was lucky, if it had to happen– if the end result was still losing him, everyone’s so much better-off that this did not involve a hospital or in fact any kind of healthcare worker. Of course we’d go through any of that for a chance to have saved him, but it was not offered, there was no chance. So it’s moot, but I can appreciate how much easier this must be than some protracted thing with ventilators and Zoom calls and an overburdened healthcare system. I can’t be grateful, but I can still acknowledge it.]

ANYWAY the thing I set out to respond to here, though, is that yeah– it’s so exhausting when someone you barely know is so Wracked With Grief over your lost loved one, but (possibly because I’m not having to put up with it that much) I can still sort of distance myself a bit and say, you know, the fact that I have to think about this constantly and this person is making me do so and they’re going to go on about their lives and probably only think of my Dear Departed once in a blue moon and be slightly sad to miss him, if even that, while I’m going to live with this every day for the rest of my life and I know for a fact if I live to be 100 I will die still bitterly missing my dad, but. It doesn’t mean their grief is less, and it’s the proximity to yours that’s intensifying it, and it’s a beautiful moment of human connection even if you don’t like them. And it sucks that they’re kind of intensifying your pain momentarily by it, but it’s still an understandable human thing. And on a level, I suppose, it’s reassuring– other people too can glimpse just how unjust and horrible it is to have to continue in a world without this person, now. It’s having your feelings somewhat validated, though in the moment it’s kind of trampling over them.

I dunno. It sucks, mostly, and I’m being philosophical to try and dull it a bit, maybe. Hard to say.

What gets me, and what I’m so delighted that this pandemic is making impossible, are the people who are like super over-the-top sobbingly performing grief at you, and who are like, clearly judging you if you are not entirely dissolved in tears at all times. That’s the shit that’s annoying. Like, someone who was friends with your mom when you were kids hanging onto your neck and sobbing at the funeral receiving line is one thing, but I know I have this one really self-absorbed married-in older relation who would find a way to make the funeral all about her in some way. There’s always one. (Mom was thinking of ways to exclude her from the Zoom thing but M-L pointed out, there’s a dang mute button, and we can claim technical difficulties if we must.) But like, that’s the kind of shit that’s annoying anyway, regardless. (I’ve known people who managed to make the ongoing process of someone else actively in that moment giving birth be about themselves, somehow, so it’s not like there’s any extremity of events that supersedes that kind of impulse.)

Anyway. It’s all very weird but so far we’re fumbling our way through. (Your picture was not posted)