In my gut, it feels like what I’m about to write belongs in my journal, away from the eyes of others, but I also know I need to vent, to release, which means it should go onto the blog.

I can’t say I’m excited about that, but … so be it.

 It’s been about five months since my mom died of cancer. It’s been about three months since my dad died of Covid. When I write that, when I read that, it doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t make sense; it sounds and reads incredibly wrong. Then again, I don’t know what sounds right. Yeah, they’re dead. I know they’re dead. But the time frame, it’s all fucked up. At times it feels like they died forever ago, and at other times it feels like they passed away yesterday, but all the time if feels as if the past so many months have been shrouded behind dark, thick clouds that only allow sunshine through every so often. I was grieving my mom for months prior to her passing, and then she died, and eight weeks to the day later, my dad died (and in between those events there was related, horrific nonsense), and the level of grief that washed over me nearly drowned me.

And then shortly after that, while still struggling to come up for air, I began sitting down to dinner every night staring at a pile of paperwork for my dead mom to the left-hand side of the room and a pile of paperwork for my dead dad to the right-hand side of the room.

So heavy. So fucking heavy. Grief carries unimaginable weight.

Months later, I’m still staring at their estate paperwork. Months later, I’m still struggling to breathe. I haven’t had a chance to get away from their deaths, to escape their deaths, to take a break from the grief, because every day I’m surrounded by it, staring down the responsibilities that come with being executor for both estates. I’ve been depressed, deeply depressed, for quite a while now. I pull myself out of it every so often. It disappears for a couple days at a time, but then it comes back and decides to crush me just because it knows it can, for the pure joy of it.

The weight of it is un-fucking-believable.

On top of that, I’m also dealing with the aftermath of their funerals and my (perhaps flawed) perception of those people who weren’t there for me. People who I expected to be there for me, either physically or emotionally, and who just weren’t.

It’s a really shitty way to live, second guessing your relationships with people. I want to give people grace, but my usual empathetic self just hasn’t found the strength to do so yet. I want to let the stress of it all go, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say that they didn’t make it to their services or reach out because of all the extraneous nonsense surrounding Covid. I mean, that’s reasonable. I know that’s reasonable. It’s entirely fucking reasonable.

At the same time, I can’t help but think that the reason people didn’t make it to their services or reach out was simply because I’m not an important enough person to them. I mean, especially when it comes to my dad. People were vaccinated at that point. They were out traveling. They were doing things. And people knew that I had cared for him for 25 odd years, how close he and I were. And so many people just didn’t come to his services—or even worse, there were those who didn’t even acknowledge his death or the death of my mom at all.

It hurts.

I’m hoping that the pain goes away soon. I want it to disappear. I don’t like feeling this way. But…those piles of papers. (I can’t even begin to tell you about the complexities I’m experiencing, but holy fuck some of this shit just sucks out loud; prior to their deaths, I could not have invented or imagined the issues I’m having right now.)

Of course, because I’m depressed, that shit has manifested in other ways, the most obvious one being weight gain. I’m the heaviest I’ve been in a long time, and that has brought out a whole other layer of self-pity. I’m still exercising (the garage is basically a fully functional gym at this point), but I’m eating like hell and keeping all the local breweries and taquerias afloat, and that’s resulted in some rather significant weight gain.

Nobody is going to call me fat, but my clothes don’t fit like they should (or don’t fit at all), I look heavy, and I certainly feel heavy. I need to get my nutrition back on track, but I’ve been telling myself that for months and it hasn’t happened yet.

Ten-percent IPAs, rocks glasses of Teremana tequila, and tacos don’t make the pain go away, but they sure do numb it. At least temporarily.

So…yeah, a lot going on and nothing going on all at once.

I want to say that I’m on the road to getting better. I’m off social media. I’m continuing to work out. I’m so thankful for time spent with friends. Squirt will be fully vaccinated in just a couple months, and that might allow me to let my guard down in other ways.

I want to feel better. I want to be healed. I’m just not there yet.