Greetings, friends. I’ve definitely fallen off the horse a bit with this journal. I got back to Portland late last Wednesday and just… sort of crumpled.
Some of it was just the weather. I was in New Hampshire from mid-February almost to the end of March. Central New Hampshire had been in the midst of a brief stretch of mild weather, which broke as soon as I arrived and turned into multiple waves of typical New England winter storms. Nevertheless the six weeks I was there was actually long enough to witness the dead of winter trail off into a protracted thaw. By the end of my stay, much of the lingering snow and ice had melted, and it was actually 60ºF and sunny the day I left.
So it was with some considerable dismay that I returned to winter still in full progress in the Pacific Northwest — colder and more overcast than it had been in New Hampshire when I left. I found myself seriously doubting my major life choices for the first time in a long time… which is a sure sign that I’m depressed.
Over the weekend, I found myself so severely depressed, in fact, that even playing Kerbal Space Program felt like too much work. That’s how bad it was. Pretty much all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch history videos about the Napoleonic Wars on YouTube.
I suppose that feeling a bit sad and unmotivated makes sense, under the circumstances. While I was in Epsom, I had a mission, a purpose for being there, a fixed objective that kept me going. Adah and I succeeded in that objective even better than we’d hoped, so much better than I got to come home a week early.
Which was part of the problem. I got “home” and wound up feeling instantly loose at ends. The reality is that I moved to the Portland area in October, then straightaway left to see my mother in the hospital. She went home, I went home, and a month later she was dead. Ever since then, my whole life has been pretty much bent on dealing with the aftermath of her life, aside from the week-long vacation to Vancouver Island that Besha and I had already planned, and the side trip I took to Joshua Tree over New Year’s to celebrate Suzy’s birthday.
Now we’re leaving for two weeks in Ireland next week, which is great. I’ve never been to Ireland, and I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate Besha’s birthday by helping her tick a travel destination off of her bucket list.
But the prospect of finishing the bookshelf brackets — remember the bookshelf brackets? — and mounting the bookshelves in my living room all seems even further away than ever. Remember the bookshelves? The ones Besha made for my birthday, almost four months ago?
Never mind actually unpacking the books, assembling my remaining furniture, and mounting my house decorations. My apartment is still a shambles of half unpacked boxes. Worse, I shipped six boxes of books back from New Hampshire via USPS Media Mail — thank you, Tikva! — to avoid having to drive them back in Leto II, and now I have even more books and still nowhere to put them.
Besha did cajole me into helping her figure out how to augment her chicken run water feeder with a more robust reservoir, which worked only because the chance to solve a modest engineering problem appealed to my vanity. It only took three or four trips to the hardware store to adapt the water-bottle-fed inverted menorah she had already built of Schedule 40 PVC, with the four plastic-and-steel water nipples that the chickens were already conditioned to use.
In the end, we added a tap ending in a hose barb to the base of a 5 gallon plastic bucket, sealed it with a pair of gaskets and some silicone adhesive, and ran a short length of plastic hose to a hose coupling attached to the top of the feeder. The hose coupling will allow Besha to remove and wash the reservoir bucket periodically without disassembling the whole water feeder. You can probably tell that I ended up proud of our handiwork simply from the lengthy description.
But once that was done, I sort of listlessly collapsed again. We spent a bunch of time on Sunday in Tyvek suits and N95 masks, crawling around in her attic crawl space, trying to diagnose the cause behind her kitchen ceiling light flickering unbearably all the time, as if presaging a zombie attack from one of the Resident Evil games. Ultimately, we yanked the fixture completely out of the ceiling, Besha taped up some plastic to keep the insulation from falling into her kitchen, and we agreed she should call an electrician, because something is definitely wrong with that electrical housing and I do not want to be responsible for wiring up something that will burn her house down.
Then I collapsed again. I have managed to run roughly every other day since I got back, but I skipped the previous weekend’s long run in my haste to finish everything I needed to do in New Hampshire to make Mom’s house photo ready. Now I am slightly behind in my half-marathon training, according to Hal. Worse, my knees have started to hurt after relatively shorter runs, meaning I am somehow still overtraining and taxing my iliotibial bands. So I have to somehow take it easier but also somehow not stop training, if I really want to finish that half-marathon in May.
All of which is to say that journaling has been strictly out of the question for the past few days, especially since this journal had become temporarily about my mother and our family and her house and everything that used to be in it.
I enormously appreciated everyone’s encouragement and sympathy, and especially the personal stories that showed me just how common, even universal, this experience is for so many people. But pouring my heart and soul into that kind of writing, and plumbing the depths of all the complex feelings I have about my mother and our family can just be … exhausting sometimes.
It’s also been time consuming. I would say that even with all the days I’ve taken off in the last couple weeks, I’ve still probably spent way, way more than my intended 15 minutes a day writing on average. It’s almost felt like a third job, after my day job, and Mom’s house.
Nevertheless the topics I wanted to write about stacked up faster than I could write them. I have probably five or six journal entries half-written in my head, which need to be drafted while they are still fresh and before I forget what it was I wanted to say.
Which feels like a lot of pressure! All of it self-imposed, but layer that on top of feeling depressed… and it becomes yet another thing to avoid in favor of hiding out under a blanket watching YouTube and questioning my life choices.
I would still like to get some of it written before Besha and I arrive in Dublin. It feels like something I have to do for myself, partly to process the grief and the anger I still have toward my mother, but also partly as a testament to her memory. Part elegy and part exorcism.
When I was a child, and sleepless with anticipation for something happening the following day, such as leaving to visit my cousins in Virginia, my mother would offer me the same advice every time.
“Thank pleasant thoughts,” she would say in sage tones, and close the bedroom door behind her.
Now that I’m in my 40s, the adult version of that looks like trying to engage a sense of gratitude with anything I can find to be grateful for. It’s the only reliable anodyne I know of for feeling depressed.
I am grateful for my health. I’m grateful to have a job that is painless and affords me general freedom from material want. I am grateful to have my sisters and my brother-in-law, who are amazing people whom I admire, and for the healthy relationships I finally get to have with my Dad and my stepmom. I am grateful for my aunts and uncles and cousins. I am grateful to get to spend time with Besha and Jeanne and Suzy and all of the people I am privileged to call friends, new and old.
Here, have a photo of your correspondent circa age 22 which he found in his mother’s home. He means well but he is reckless and sometimes dishonest and I don’t know if I’d trust him. He might grow up to be a decent guy, though.
If you’re reading this, I am grateful for you. Thanks for helping me work through this. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Have a good night!