on Deathwork & Griefwork

the valley of the shadow of death

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It’s June. It is twenty days away from the anniversary of a fixed point in time. It is two years ago and it is twenty years ago.

The grief pulls at me and I feel like I am heavily pregnant again, waiting and waiting and waiting for the birth so that I don’t have to hurt like this any more. I had back labor in the week before he was born and I cried because I couldn’t stop myself crying from the pain.

When he was born it took a few days for him to look familiar to me. He was always comforted by my nearness.

When his father left, he had no memories to hide away in his heart for later. I think that this was best; if there was a better time to leave us it was probably then, when we were all still so new.

The earth rotates around the sun unceasingly, turning the years inexorably. There is not enough time, there was not enough of me, I could not help him. You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped.

He left us almost nineteen years after his father did. There was nothing I could do. You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped.

I knew this was coming, years ago. I knew there was a hurricane destroying its way to us, and I ran and I ran and I ran with him and one day I could not outrun it. You cannot run from someone else’s destiny.

He is not dead but my heart hurts as if death took him that day almost two years ago. I dwell in the shadow of that day and I will mourn while the echoes of labor pains grip me. With the strength of my body I brought him to his first breath. That room was so quiet and my memory of it is colored in shades of grey.

Everyone but me was upset when they learned I was pregnant with him. I was always the one who wanted him. I was always there, always steadfast, always standing between him and the oncoming storm, until I couldn’t any more. Each must be free to choose.

I love him, I loved him. You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped.

I will mourn you. I will cry as if you are dead. I will not stop wishing that everything had been different. And I will live, even though there is pain that lives in me.

on Co-Parenting/on Hope/the Pandemic/the Work

february 17th journal

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hope painted on a rock

I’ve finally started asking for feedback on my death doula services page. I still need a name for the service, but the more important thing is WHAT IS IT and WHO AM I, basically. If anyone out there would like to review it before publishing, pop a comment below or use my contact page to let me know.

This post is going to be a lot of random shit all jumbled up together, hold on to your butts

I am a proud supporter of Autostraddle, and because I’m a supporter I was able to participate in a weekend-only popup Discord server last weekend; and it was so much fun that a bunch of us were scrambling like hell to make new spaces on Discord where we could continue to hang out. A bunch of queer people, hanging out and sending memes and playing video games and sharing recipes and pictures of pets and, basically, enjoying the safety and expansiveness of a space that we so rarely get.

Since I came out of the woodwork a bit more in order to participate as queerly as possible, I shared one of the pages here on this site. So then I updated some of the sidebar widgets here, to reflect not just games I’m playing and books I’m working on finishing, but also podcasts I listen to regularly.

And THEN, a lovely person emailed me asking about death doula services on behalf of a friend, and I realized that I need to get that page up, and eventually a website, which led me to the first paragraph of this post. (I told you it was a mess in here)

Serious talk, though

People in the southern United States are freezing and have no water service — hundreds of thousands of them — and people are dying.

People here on varying visas with varying immigration status are stuck in no-man’s-land because USCIS is doing what looks like fuck-all with processes that are vitally important to many people, some of them really close and important to me. I’ve emailed my reps and an immigration attorney and I’m honestly just trying to keep my chin up so that I can be here and be present for them when they need it.

People are still dying in huge numbers from COVID-19 and its various new strains, and I don’t know how to hold enough of them in my heart without shattering, so instead I am focusing on who I can help right now — who I can support right now — who I can be here for right now. My heart wants to hold the whole world and my spoons level informs me that I cannot do that. I think I might struggle with this for most, if not all, of my life: that I am only able to do as much as I am able to do, not one bit more.

And also

My sleep patterns are so weird. Days are still blurring together, and even journaling every day, where I write the day and date in several places, is not helping me to hold this information in my currently available RAM. Sometimes I can go to sleep and rest all night, and some nights I can’t go to bed until the fingers of first light begin to draw themselves on the sky. I don’t like it but it feels unavoidable. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but there are many hills to die on and I’m not choosing this one.

This Mercury Gatorade (inside joke lol) has been wacky and frustrating here and there. I’m supposed to have gotten a call from the local county court about my name change after I sent in the requisite paperwork to one of the government offices involved, and three months later I haven’t heard from them so … what now?? I left a voicemail and hopefully it doesn’t fall into a black hole.

Our eighteen-month-old little person is having so much fun getting bigger and stronger and sillier. His squeaks and exclamations and almost-words are amazingly adorable and when he picks up a 2/3 full gallon of water just to see if he can, the look on his face is priceless.

Wherever you are, I hope you have something to hope for

I am relying on the structure of my days and the collective interdependence of my big family for my doses of hope. There are days when all of us feel like shit, except for maybe the toddler, and we’ve all had to feel our way through to believing that it’s okay to feel like shit for a whole day. Or more.

I hope for you what I hope for myself: moments of peace, however fleeting.

Frodo Baggins: I wish the ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

JRR Tolkien / Peter Jackson; Fellowship of the Ring
on Co-Parenting/on Hope

january 8th journal

Posted on
Don't Give Up

I did not write here yesterday because I was recovering from the tweetstorms about the FUCKING COUP that very nearly happened. And today is full of everyone laughing and opining about a certain orange person who has been permanently banned from Twitter.

I’ve had a migraine today and that does make it more difficult to write or to string my thoughts together in a way that makes sense enough to say them aloud. I have, however, been reading a lot of tweets and enjoying everyone’s hot takes. I realize that there are likely to be more of these brutal events in our future, but at least just right now things feel a little bit better.

This week has felt like an entire six months, and I can’t believe I posted about Bean Dad IN THE SAME WEEK as the assault on the Capitol.

I wonder how long it will feel until January 20th arrives, and how many more awful shit things that awful shit people do will have happened.

Today my eleven year old daughter is now my twelve year old daughter. It wasn’t a phone call day, but I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I hope her day was bright and special. When I told her that she’d be staying with her dad for longer than we originally planned, she said she was sad because she wouldn’t be coming home with me, but also happy because she gets more time with her dad. And honestly, that’s what I have wanted for her. To feel a sense of balance and comfort in the position she finds herself: a person navigating a torn-in-half world with parents who split up and who has A Lot of Opinions on a great many things, with an intelligent mind that sometimes just gets completely overloaded and ends up leading to words she can’t take back.

The adrenaline and cortisol of this week, culminating (for me) on Wednesday, means that I’m in pretty rough shape physically and I’m having trouble mentally as well; it’s like a panic attack that hasn’t arrived yet, but you can feel it coming. I hope that I can find some peace that isn’t contingent on every new thing I find out about.