Atalist's Dungeon

 A great friend of mine and I had a midnight chat the other night. It wasn't like other nights where I stayed up too late having a good time. This was a time when I felt stuck, stuck in my grief and the realization that the moment the bells chime and the ball drops tomorrow, my mother will be lost to time. There have already been so many things that she has missed but the close of a year brings finality to it.  It is a hard thing to accept and yet time moves on with or without my realization.  New years is a hard one because it is the end of this year, a year my mom won't escape, a new year she won't see. It is a period at the end of a sentence that is finished being written but so much has been left unsaid. I recognize that we die in the middle of sentences and that our books never truly finish when illness causes an end. It is always a tragedy. They are always too young, too kind, too [insert sentiment here] and yet all those kind words wound. It's funny that the w...

Every time I see a post on social media about cancer I feel the immediate urge to run away from my computer and all forms of social media, never to return. Don't get me wrong, leaving social media would not be terrible, but the trauma I am experiencing has a correlation with cancer. My mom died from an aggressive form of lung cancer. It was horrific and reduced my mother to a shell of her former self. Now when I see posts from my friends who are actively seeking comfort and sympathy for what they are going through, I want to run in the opposite direction and not emotionally invest my time in them. That is the troubling part. I call some of these people friends, and yet I look at them now with grey-colored glasses. I am fearful of investing time and I am scared that I will lose them too. That is no way to live and yet I have more work to do with the trauma I have gone through. It feels like it was a lifetime ago, and yet we are still within the first year of losing her. We are still...

 I feel like I have been away from life.  Away from friends, family and just generally distant. It's not that I want to be, it is more or less the constant struggle of this time of year: sick, working, kids stuff... you get the picture. Grayson came home from school with a high high fever. This started a downward spiral of illness in our house which of course left me very very sick. I am currently awaiting test results for walking pneumonia, oh joy. This put a pause on all the things I wanted to do. It hid us from the world for a bit and we were isolated in our own quarantine. It felt like the inverse of 2020 where we were hiding from the illness, but here we were hiding because we were sick. Several hospital trips in the past few weeks has taught me about the dire straights our health care system is in but I don't want to focus on that. Being in that sick void caused me to lose time and then time caught up. We are in the thick of "the holidays" and yet there is no ho...