Real Connections in Things That I'm Grateful For

I’m so behind on work, and I honestly can’t even get myself to feel any motivation for it. Like, it’s all so corrupt that I don’t even have momentum to get things done in a timely manner, which is not like me at all.

I’ve almost completely extricated myself from most of the major social media platforms. I had a hell of a time trying to explain to my mother how to use Telegram. She can barely operate Facebook Messenger but here I was trying to show all those things to her. It wasn’t the smoothest thing ever, but she’s having a. Fought time. She’s at that age where her friends are starting to diem, which I understand since she just lost her parents is a bit of a shock to her.

She’s not like me. I have had much more death in my life than she has, she was quite overwhelmed as I explained it to her and said it explained a lot of my behavior throughout the years.

I started losing people my age in high school, when I was 16, and it never quite went away. It seems like every age range I was in there were deaths. It all culminated in the dreadful year of 2016, I can’t remember the exact number now, but it was somewhere around 24 or 25 deaths in one year. I went to two funerals every month that year.

And then the next year was when my grandmother died and I realized that the volume of death doesn’t matter, it’s the depth of the living. I mean, I still come across picture of myself and James, or Madison. I was surprised that when I got my iPhone back, I still have the voicemail her sister sent me telling me she died just after Christmas.

My mother is great at the legal and financial consequences of death, but all the emotional impact is an experience that she doesn’t have. The complex feelings about my grandfather’s death probably left her feeling conflicted, I’ve only felt that way recently. Then the one-two-punch of my other grandparents’ deaths were like a shotgun to the chest, I have the luxury of being here and working toward something, but she’s got nothing.

I mean, she ran my grandfather’s business for 20 years from home, and now it’s gone and she has nothing, then right when she’s ready to re-engage with her social life because she’s (finally) throwing out my little brothers (who just got the keys to their house), her friends start dying.

It must be very disorienting.

I’m trying to be more empathetic to her (this was brought about because I randomly came across an Instagram video of Edgar, who looks terrible but is killing it in his career [he seriously looks not good, I’d be worried if it was still my job to be worried about him] followed by a video of Jonah [he looks fine, but he’s moved to Maine, which is so odd] the only upside to Joe being dead is that I won’t randomly run into social media posts about him]).

Then there’s Richard, whom I finally spoke to the other night, he’s starting the process of suing his University because, despite being in California, they’re deciding to follow through with our new President’s decision to eliminate DEI programs, so his scholarships for his low-income status and disability status are suddenly going away.

He called me to ask about his legal options and I advised how to retain a civil rights attorney who specializes in disability discrimination, so I gave him the name and contact of the one I used.

I forget what else we talked about, except the crazy story about the Grindr hook-up he had who turned out to be a woman in drag insisting she was a top and trying to top him. It’s quite possibly one of the craziest stories he’s ever told me, and we’ve told each other some doozies in the last 21 years. It’s a wild story.

Well, I need to get back to work… or just start doing the work in the first place.