Letting it be

This has been an extraordinarily hard week, both because of various externals (church, university president, car accidents of one I care about) but also, there have been more reminders of my father's death than I wanted - or felt, at one point, I could bear:

Sunday: getting the e-mail from Ed with the lovely obituary, and being reminded what an unusually good man my father was, but also reminders of the past that I can now only remember. (Ed was kind of an satellite friend of my family; we didn't see him much because of his work but he had remained in touch with my parents after his graduation)

Tuesday (? All the days run together): the picture of my dad coming in the mail

Other days: realizing that now I have more than twice the amount of financial statements coming in that I will have to track and keep and I will probably need to purchase several more three-ring binders and just keep them, I don't know, in my bedroom or somewhere accessible so that when stuff comes in I can just put it in the binder instead of stacking it and going "I'll deal with this later." Secret: I tend to be terribly disorganized about these kinds of things and it's only by good fortune (and St. Anthony's occasional intervention) that I haven't lost something monumentally important. So I have to get more organized and this feels like another hobby that I neither want nor am any good at.

Wednesday: the talk with my mom about some of the planning for the memorial service.

Thursday: another phone call, this time about the travellers checks and about "I'm having to order paperwork to track down to see if, as we remember, those bonds were cashed in or if they're still outstanding and need to be found" (They no longer had a safety-deposit box after the bank they had had one at changed and was sold to a corporate bank they didn't support, or that would be the logical place).

Yesterday: e-mail from my brother, and I honestly couldn't tell if he was assuming I hadn't done some of the paperwork for us to split one of the accounts and was shaming me for it, or if he was asking me to do his share of the paperwork for him, but I curtly e-mailed back that (a) I HAD done my share of the paperwork and (b) I had received a letter that my share of the money was now in my account. So it's on him again.

But, man.

I opined this morning on Twitter that somewhere in the 1-2 month window after the death of a loved one (spouse, parent, child, sibling....), all the bereaved family members should get a short vacation. Separately, probably, so they don't have to talk about it with each other. Just....go on a cruise or go camping or go stay in a cabin somewhere and the whole point is YOU DON'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH PAPERWORK OR LOGISTICS DEALING WITH THE DEATH FOR A WEEK. Just a week's break where you could wake up in the morning and know that the day won't bring any new surprises of "hey you have to send a death certificate here" or "but what do you want done with their XYZ...." or "think about the tax implications of how you accept the few thousand dollars you inherit" and it would be a very necessary break, I think.

And if I may rant more for a short bit: I am TIRED. Tired of being strong, tired of bearing up under all of it, tired of telling myself that tears cannot come out when I'm talking with my mom because she's dealing with even worse than I am (the man she knew and loved for more than 60 years - they dated for, I think, 5 years before marrying; the father of her children; the person who took care of a lot of the financial stuff or would be the gruff baritone voice on the phone if someone was being unhelpful to her because she was a woman). I am prepared in some ways to become my mom's "champion" if she needs it.....but of course I do not have a "champion" myself and it gets very hard and very tiring. And I know that I can't just lie down on the floor and have a tantrum because that helps nothing, so I just soldier on, tiredly. 

(I'm still working on that grief piece for Ordinary Times even if it looks like my pizza piece either got lost in the shuffle, or wasn't good enough... I suppose if the grief piece gets rejected I could put it up here eventually)


(And again, I am so sorry for all of this. I WANT this to go back to being a lighthearted craft/reading blog, but....there's not much light in my heart these days. If you stop reading I will understand; maybe it will eventually return to what it once was. I wish I could get my optimism and resiliency back)

 One last thing: those of you who read the Little House books, remember how Pa had a "trouble song" ("I am Happy as a Big Sunflower")? I have adopted "Keep on the Sunny Side" as mine. I've been hearing it a lot on the John Denver Pandora channel I made, because the algorithm has decided that Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" album is similar to Denver's music (I don't disagree). And so I've been hearing it a lot, and more than once, here at home, I've thrown my head back and sung:

There's a dark and troubled side of life
There's a bright and sunny side too
Though we meet with the darkness and strife,
The sunny side we also may view....

Usually my voice is shaking by the time I get to the chorus, but weirdly, it does help.

(I can't sing ALONG with the NGDB version; they are using a key that is hard for me to achieve. Even though my voice is maybe not THAT different than Mother Maybelle's was in tone, somehow I can't sing it in the key they use on the album. It's a little low for me...)