The whole package.

Jon and I started watching Lodge 49 when he was still sleeping in the parlor after his back surgery and first radiation treatments. We would watch the two seasons at least five times in subsequent years. I still think it’s a near perfect show for a certain type of weirdo. It has a psychedelic infused soundtrack, story based in SoCal, tons of nods to 19th/20th century occult mysticism, Tarot archetype characters, and a quest for greater meaning in unexpected places.

I hadn’t planned to write about Lodge 49, but when thinking about synthesis, I thought of the Hermetic principle, “as above, so below,” which fits pretty nicely against Hegel’s dialectic method, Hermeticism and Hegel in tension, with logic and spirit taking thesis and antithesis.

With people, especially the ones you love, you get the whole package. You don’t get to choose. I got the person I laid my head against while watching Lodge 49, or Murder, She Wrote, falling asleep before the end of the show, and I got the person who was painfully pragmatic and absolutely exhausting at a philosophical argument.

This week has been like surfacing from a dive to the dive boat. You’re holding onto the line in choppy water, while keeping an eye on your buddy, waiting for the rest of the divers to come up, so you can return with all accounted for. You don’t want to use your snorkel, you’re tired of your reg, but the water just keeps rocking you with your fully-inflated BC making you feel like a buoy bobbing in the channel. You get salt water in your mouth, you spit it out. You put in your snorkel. You keep hanging on as you sometimes get thrown a few feet and nearly lose hold.

I resigned to take the kids to Norwescon this past weekend. They’ve grown up going nearly every year, and they didn’t want to miss it. I tried to participate, but it was too hard. Years previous, sometimes I joked (mostly to myself) that Jon and I had a polyamorous relationship, but it was the writing, and speculative fiction community, that he was additionally and thoroughly devoted. It felt hollow to be there without him, without him sharing discoveries with me, and I with him.

The kids had a great time, though.

I took our wedding anniversary day off yesterday. It would have been twenty years. I was in pieces the day before, and I’m not sure how I got through the work day. It was good to indulge in spa-oriented self-care, lunch with friends, yoga at my favorite yoga studio. It helped me get through the day.

But.

I was late after yoga to pick up the eldest. It’s been hard to be on time, doing yoga, and getting up there right at the time he needs to be picked up. It’s late, which has made it hard. It’s the little gripes of being a single parent, with extracurriculars that shift schedule every few months, sometimes to very inconvenient times. I need to be so many places, at specific times, sometimes for blocks of time that take me away from other things I need to do, or relaxation that could be had on my own couch.

I realized between being late for pickup (again) and my 6mo review at work, I’m struggling. I got my taxes done, the estate stuff is going to be done soon (I hope!), bills are paid, roof still holds and people are fed, but I realized I’m having to both accept for myself and ask others to accept that I’m not OK, and I don’t know when I will be, again.

Even more jarring this week, through my review and mentorship sessions with my boss, that I now have awareness of how not OK I am, but also how long I’ve not been OK. As bad as my last year at my last job was, that last year also was the year we found out about the cancer progression, the beating it back with more radiation and hope, the frantic concert schedule, leading to the decision for chemo just in time to be laid off with 60% of my team.

It’s been a hard six months. It’s been a hard 18 months. It’s been a hard two and a half years. Seven years since his back started hurting from the cancer.

It’s easy to spiral out.

But to come back, that’s the “whole package.” All the hard and annoying parts come with all of the extraordinarily beautiful, calming, restful parts.

Grief dredges up a lot, like any grievances of my marriage could somehow soften the silence keeping me awake at night. Between my Appalachian frugal roots and Jon’s pragmatism, we didn’t go on the vacations I wished we had gone on. We bought our new couch too late. I would start to spiral out and he’d pull me back. Sometimes we’d argue, as I’d try to shoehorn my wanderlust into a pragmatic framework, realizing too late if I’d just said - but I wanna and I don’t care about the consequences… oh wait. That’s the thing, he always made me stop and think.

Buzz kill. And I say that with love, and am joking only because as above, so below. The bills need paying, jobs need to be kept, children to school, and savings for that rainy day. We need adventure, new experiences, exploration inside and out, ecstatic communion.

And we got his last year before chemo, with a heavy and nearly unmanageable concert schedule. And we got the handful of concerts we could go to in the last year of his life. Through our years together, the beforetimes and after, we saw concerts in Dublin, Brooklyn, Chicago, and of course here in Seattle at so many venues, and out at the Gorge Amphitheater.

Tuesday, I leave on an adventure. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for months, and now it’s upon me, I’m starting to get nervous. TWO DAYS of tattooing, in a small town in the Hudson Valley, where I don’t know a soul. OK, that is unnecessarily dramatic because I have acquaintances, friends, and family within a few train stops, or short drives away, but it still feels big.

In more familiar, but still exciting adventures, I’ll be in NYC catching up with friends on both sides of my tattoo, and seeing the Rocky Horror Show on Broadway the day before I leave.

The awareness, of how much I’m struggling, seems somewhat good news. My reasoning is that coming out of an illness, coming off a heavy trip, finally getting sleep after too long, but still needing more. It’s coming to realize you’re still impaired BUT ALSO that you were more impaired before. Having that bit of room to know just how hard it feels is a type of progress, one that’s cancelling my workouts for a few weeks, taking a trip, and taking a little faith that one day things will be OK again.