05.15.2025
This year started with my father dying and it's not going much better halfway in. Every time someone calls me I think someone died. One time someone did, but I will not discuss that out of respect.
I think maybe I'm going to die, or Angus will. It seems extremely likely, more likely than us living, at this point.
Fear is the mind killer. That's from Dune, but everyone knows that, and it's precient and extremely True.
So this is the year I am having. I watched cancer kill my dad in a very seriously brutal way. I missed his actual death but I sat next to his body. It was just an empty body. This was the most serious Truth I have learned in my life. But I don't know God, or believe in anything, so all I can think is that his consciousness was reabsorbed into the great consciousness within which we are all a tiny little speck of dust. So really not that serious of a change, for him, but devastating for us. I live like it didn't happen and then the grief hits so hard I choke on it, fall to the ground sometimes, can't speak to anyone. It is like being sanded from the inside with a large rasp. My bones dissolve, just the liquid matter is left.
I have been so disassociated I don't really know if anything has happened to me. For example I sat on my foot for five hours and then stood up without knowing I had no foot anymore, it was a comatose foot. I put weight on the coma foot and it bent the wrong way and a resounding crack jarred me into reality as I fell on top of the foot. I think I broke my ankle but I have been living with it in pretty regular pain for almost two months now. It's better for sure. I still went to pilates.
Pilates. It is the best dissasociative aid. My body is snatched and I feel kind of unstoppable but I also don't use my brain, at all.
Fear of silence, of empty time. I would be relieved to learn I was dying, in a way, because this is not really being Alive. I think that's what depression is, you're not really alive. Everyone around you thinks you are and you animate yourself according to their expectations to the best of your ability in any given moment. The more self-consumed people, which is to say, basically everyone, don't notice that you are missing from the picture. They just want your attention, but the "your" part doesn't really matter.
My friend of nearly fourteen years sent me an email saying that her fear of death, change, and losing me have made her unable to continue in her role as My Friend. She was referring to me asking why she failed to support me after my father, someone she loved and who also loved her, died at 61. Instead of making a commitment she just told me it was just not possible. She said "I'm just an empty person" and that was supposed to form an explanation for behavioural sociopathy. In my disassociated state I read the email, nodded a few times, and didn't really think about it again for a couple of weeks. Then I wanted to send her a response with every single thing she said in the email that was a lie highlighted in yellow. Her email is beautifully written and full of lies. The kinds of lies people tell themselves all the time, narratives of selfhood, a symptom of the widespread narcissistic disease afflicting people who had it too easy. It is unfortunate that I am the kind of person who can always tell that the person is lying but I have always been this way. Also, insecurity's favourite coping mechanisms are hiding and lying. I think my ex-friend does both, pretty much 100% of the time. She is profoundly selfish, to the point where it might be a diagnosis.
After my father died she called me every couple of weeks to say "How are you doing?" which is basically the stupidest thing you can ask someone who is grieving their dead parent. If you were going to ask someone whose family member just died how they are doing today, please don't. Get them something they like to eat instead, or take them to sit near the ocean.
My friend is scared of being perceived, which is a particularly intense ailment that I can't really help with anymore, because unfortunately I have a very sharp perception of her and this makes her avoid me. It's kind of demonic actually but I'm trying to just be peaceful.
And anyway nobody else's father has died except my husband's, so nobody really knows what to do. I had friends coming over five, six days after his death complaining about their jobs and relationships. The difference with these friends is that they were able to come back from the confrontation and learn how to go through this alongside me. So thank God for them.