If this project has done anything so far it has shown me that I am nowhere ready to process my grief. I set out on this journey with the intention to do so and instead I neglected and ran from it even more than I had before. Which… is to be expected, I guess. There is quite a lot to work through in the wake of the hurricane that became my life.

During the last few days it has become clear to me that the phrase “they went mad with grief” or “their grief drove them crazy” isn’t just a euphemism. It is a very real thing.

Now, I haven’t looked into the actual science of it, but from my own experience it is a real occurrence. I have felt it. I feel it every other day. My brain goes off into these bizarre tangents where I “feel” like I’ve lived an experience before. Or that I have had some prophetic vision of this exact moment in the past; aka “de ja vu.” Some would just get that fleeting feeling and move on, but I have developed this weird obsession where I think it is tied to my impending death. As if I am next on the list, and I have somehow sent messages from the future to my past/present self to prepare for this inevitable end.

Crazy, right?

I try to keep myself grounded, but it is so hard not to get pulled into the orbit of this insanity. Which is why I have come to the conclusion that this is just my grief and my inaction in resolving it. At least, I hope.

To give a little more context, for those that haven’t followed along, all of this chaos began in 2019. Prior to the world literally falling apart because of COVID, my personal world started it’s free fall. It began in the waiting room of my mother’s neurologist. My mother mentioned in passing that my father had been falling. He had fallen 3 times the previous weekend. I very nearly joked about getting him a life alert, and in hindsight I should have. Shortly after this almost random exchange, my mother received the results of her second brain scan. The nurse practitioner turned to me and whispered that my mother had had a significant loss in brain mass within a years time, and was likely due to Alzheimer’s.

In the parking lot outside of the doctor’s office, I asked my parents if they understood what the doctor had told us. Neither of them did. Most likely because the medical “professional” didn’t tell them, just me. (It would later become a point of contention between me and my mother when her disease got worse. Those were always fun conversations.)

This all occurred on a Monday, and then on the following Thursday, I awoke to find a missed phone call from my father. The only problem was, the voice on the message was a stranger’s informing me that my father had been taken to the hospital.

For whatever fucking reason, I took my sweet fucking time responding. I got dressed, went to my inspection, informed my boss about the phone call, and then casually drove to my parents house. I pulled up to find my parent’s front door wide open, as my mother was waiting for me to get there. We got in the car, drove to the hospital, blissfully unaware of the cataclysmic shift that awaited us beyond the double doors of the ICU.

My father was brain dead.

What I have gathered from my mother’s many immensely morbid and graphic retelling and from the details from that stranger (who I would come to know quite well as Jessica) it all started when my father woke up to pee in the early morning hours. While in the bathroom he lost his balance and hit his head on the counter. He called for my mother, and as his head was aggressively filling with blood, he gurgled out “get help.” To which my mother’s response was to run outside, somewhere around 6 in the morning, and proceed to shout “help.” Somewhere in that time my mother went in and moved my dad from the bathroom into the bedroom, where she tried to get him into the bed.

It was never explicitly stated, but I have a hunch that in my mother’s dementia ridden brain and her moving of my father is where all of this met it’s ultimate conclusion.

I’m still uncertain, but from what I understand, my mother returned to the exterior to once again call for help, ignoring the fucking phone in her house that could have easily called 911. Outside she encountered someone who told her to do just that, however she had no idea how to do that or simply forgot. Who knows and quite frankly, doesn’t matter.

In that time frame she encountered the stranger Jessica. This woman, who my parents had never spoken with before, was their next door neighbor. She just so happened to be putting her son on the bus to school when she was confronted with my panicked mother. Here is where some sanity came into the situation and she did all of the normal things one does in a fucking crisis.

After piecing together context clues from my father’s cell phone, she called to tell me what had happened.

It is still so strange to me, even now, that prior to all of this she had never spoken with my parents or I. Yet after this day, she would become a huge presence in my family’s life. It was destiny, I guess.

By the time we finally got back to see my father, he had already had a chunk of his skull removed and the loss of whatever was left of his brain activity. He was literally being kept alive by machines. I remember the doctor telling me all of this with irritation, like he was annoyed that we weren’t there when he arrived at the hospital. (Was this my fucking fault?)

I remember going in to see him, unmoved by the limp form of my father in the hospital bed, and seeing my mother reach up and try to touch his fucking head of all things. I had to rip her arm back, as the piece of paper, directly above him, said to not touch it as literally just behind the thin, fleshy wall was his fucking brain.

It was in this moment where I was thrust into a world of care and authority I did not want, nor was I remotely prepared for. I was left to make all of the decisions about my father’s care and end of life options. Something no one in my fucking family had ever had the guts to discuss. Which makes sense. Talking about one’s death isn’t really a thrilling topic of discussion. However, since this entire debacle I have lost all discomfort about death and have discussed it at length with the ones who will be responsible for those decisions upon my demise.

This all happened in the end of June, just a week from the 4th of July. The leftover excitement of the summer season, remaining from my school days, no longer applied. This would forever be known as “the time of death.” As it would be accompanied by my mother’s and my husband’s subsequent passing.

With my father gone and being the only child of he and my mother’s marriage, I was left to care for my mother. Something that only became increasingly difficult as the grief of my father’s passing aggressively gnawed away at the weaker parts of her softening brain. She could barely speak. Whatever was imparted to me was in broken phrases or terms. It was like a second language. One my husband seemed to speak better than I did. Or she just pretended. That was something I wasn’t ever prepared for, the lying. My mother seemed to revert to a child and for someone who once couldn’t bear lying to me about Santa Clause at five years old, had zero issue speaking false truths now.

Another thing I wasn’t prepared for was when my mother refused to see me one time because she was adamant that I was there to kill her. That was a fun one. Her crazed red eyes glaring at me with distrust. I tried to guard myself from the possibility of her forgetting who I was, but not for this. I would have preferred her forgetting me. That never happened though.

Within 3 years of her diagnosis, she was merely a ghost of her former self. She passed in 2022, almost to the day of my father. Her body forgot how to swallow.

What’s weird to me now, is I am second guessing that year. Grief rampaged through my memory like a pack of elephants through the jungle. Now most things are half memories, if even that. Sometimes I have to ask my loved ones if that actually happened or if I am misremembering. (By the way, I was wrong. The date above is correct now, but it wasn’t originally. I was getting it mixed up with my husband.)

All of this became even more exhausting as a little over a year later of the traumatic “dad” event, my husband would be diagnosed with a terminal illness that would strip him of every ounce of muscle in his body. He would become wheelchair bound and I would once again be thrust into a role I never ever dreamed I would play.

I have joked so many times before, but it genuinely feels like I was cursed by a witch. The speed and the veracity of all that occurred leaves me paralyzed. And I’m left to ask, when is it my turn? If all of this could happen to the people I loved so suddenly, why not me?

And I understand that I am mortal and my time will come. With all of this, though, it feels like it is more immediate. As if it is this weekend. Or the next. Or the following month. Maybe even after I post this blog.

The one thing I cannot grasp is where to even begin or HOW to process all of this. (Is this even what is causing this overwhelming psychosis? Maybe I am just legitimately crazy.)

Everyday I just want to fucking scream. I am so angry at life. Sure there are moments of beauty but it feels broken, unreal. Like I’m living a strangers life and not my own. And it is that thought that send me spiraling, once again, into the land of crazy. So with that I shall bid adieu to you, dear reader. It is time for bed.