The Weirdest World in the World...

For the last few months, I’m pretty sure Mum’s been doing her best to make sure we’re both in the kitchen at/around the same time for dinner and afterwards. ( Read more... )

We often end up talking about stuff on the news, if I’m up there when it’s on. Or things that come up in other shows. ( Read more... )

Tonight, she was telling me about something I think she found on Netflix, a show about the aged care industry, and how terrible it is. We’ve both agreed that, for various different reasons, aged care homes sound horrendous to us. Mum made some comment about people sitting in homes and having no quality of life, and I had to point out that not everyone is going to be miserable under the conditions she was describing - if I was in a home with a good internet connection and comfortable furniture and food I actually liked, I could be quite comfortable with a daily life that would drive her batty. But she was talking about not having purpose in life anymore.

This is something we’d talked about before. Last year, after Mum had officially retired and was facing the awareness that my nieces, who she spent a fair bit of time with, would be moving to the other side of the Sydney region, she was struggling. She’d managed to refocus herself on getting everything ready for her to move as well. She’s lived in this house for, I think more than 50 years, so she has a lot of things here that need to be sorted through before she can pack up and move somewhere smaller.

As well as her own accumulations of 50 years, she’s got things my dad left behind, things she brought here that belonged to her parents and her grandmother who raised her, things my half-sisters decided they didn’t want, and things my brother hasn’t taken away yet. Plus all of my stuff, but at least I’m here to go through that.

But everything’s changed now. Neither of us know what we’re doing anymore.

We both had a rough idea of what this year would involve. ( Read more... )

As I was writing this, Mum came downstairs - she was heading to the basement to check on the laundry and the dehumidifier - and was talking to me about something. She also asked if I was okay, so I had to explain why I was sitting here typing and crying. She apologised, and said she shouldn’t have talked about that. I told her no, she can, it’s just the timing, because it was something I’d already been thinking about. And that I’m writing it all out mostly to process it and get it out of my head, because that’s important for me to do. Writing things down always helps me let them go. The act of collating the feelings into words helps me to process them and get my head around them, and then they stop hovering in the corners of my mind, undefined (that’s a good rhyme, that should be in a song).

I don’t want to make her feel guilty about expressing where her head is at. We’ve actually talked a bit about life and purpose and finding meaning in life in the last few months - it came up because it’s something I’ve been talking to people about on reddit, and people there call me an optimist, which amuses me given how much of this mental stance comes from cynicism. And I think I am in a better place than her on that subject, because I had such a dramatically big good thing happen to me, something that I could firmly say was worth everything bad that happened before it. And while I’m now in the midst of the worst thing I’ve ever been through, I still have the intensity of that good thing to hold onto as a memory and a hope for what could come later.

I might be having trouble seeing how I get from here to that theoretical “later” beyond just persisting, but at least I believe that it’s possible.

Ugh. And now it’s 11.30pm, I have a headache, and I have work in the morning *sighs* At least tomorrow is wfh.

I haven't posted here in years and years, but my other social media outlets don't lend themselves to long-form ramblings, and I'm in desperate need of an outlet.

Raq passed away, on the evening of December 28th, 2025. ( Cut for details of that night. )

People didn't all leave the house till very late that night. And then it took a bit of time for me to be able to sleep. I don't remember now what time it was, but it was hours and hours between us calling the ambulance and the house being quiet again.

The first day after, I was still fiercely shut down. ( Cut for grief and coping )

The coroner called a few days in to let me know what was going to happen. Then again a few days later to let me know they'd declared it a natural death, due to Raq's weight and her FND.

It's bothered me, since then. ( Read more... )

Once that had been determined, they told me I could arrange a funeral, but that there was no rush. They'd take care of Raq until arrangements were made.

It took me a while to be ready for that. It wasn't till Raq's mother had reached out to ask if they could have some of Raq's ashes that I started doing more than briefly looking around. That gave me a goal - I wanted someone who could help me get part of Raq home to her mother.

( Finding a funeral director )

After my extra week off, I had to go back to work. My boss is letting me work from home while I adjust. She's been very sympathetic and supportive - again. She's always been helpful when things have been rough.

I was only back at work for a week, and I spent most of that week working on a couple of tasks that are mostly data entry or bulk data review, which was good. But then I had another week off.

I'd booked this week off last year, because it was the week mum was going on holidays with our extended family. It was going to be a relaxing week for Raq and I to have the house to ourselves, run the air conditioning as much as we wanted, and not have to worry about being noisy at night.

Instead, it was the first time I really, properly sobbed. Nearly three weeks after it happened. ( More grief and discussion of death and chronic illness, including hospitalisation )

Everything now is just, blank, or crying. For a while there, I could hold it all down as long as I put enough effort into distraction, but it's started creeping through anything and everything. It can crop up while I'm working, or driving, or even when I'm putting all my focus on distractions. I just feel it welling up and I'll start quietly weeping. I think part of that is because there's so much time I have to spend pushing it aside for practical reasons. It tries to get me when I try to sleep, and I have to keep refusing to think about it because I need sleep. But then when I wake up on a work day, I have to shower and dress and work and I can't think about it then, either. So I think it's building up and leaking out whenever it can.

I've looked into grief counselling, but organising something like that takes a lot of executive function, and I don’t have so much of that right now. I also looked into the EAP service work offers, but we apparently didn’t pay for the self-service online booking, so I’d have to either call (nope) or email to organise a booking, and I don’t know what or when or how…I’d wanted to log in and look at the online booking thing so I could see what they offered and what sort of times and people were available, but I’ll have to work up the nerve to email them and ask for that info instead.

I go back and forth on how useful I think it’s likely to be, but I think it would be good to talk to someone who can give me a yardstick for where I am now. Am I doing anything I really shouldn’t be, for one. And while I know everyone’s grief is unique, and it takes time, I’d like to have a sense of whether I’m within the range of normal, even if I’m at one end or the other of that range.

Most of the time, when I start crying, that’s all it is. ( More grief, more loss, discussion of suicidality )

The most unfair thing (to me, at least - the most unfair thing in the entire situation is that Raq doesn’t get to experience anything else in the world, and that burns me every day), is that this is currently part of a pretty long series of struggles and challenges, and even now that the worst of all possible things has happened, the world still can’t give me a break. I was already deep in burnout, and desperately in need of some time off. We’d already been dealing with Raq’s health, and the heat, and mum pushing to get things organised so we could all move (which I wanted to do, but wasn’t coping with the pressure over), and I finally got some time off over Xmas, and before I was even on leave, I caught a cold. Then a few days into the break I rotated the mattress, and managed to injure my sciatic nerve. And then this happened, and everything fell apart.

And then the next time I got into my car, I discovered that the air conditioner had failed. And I took the car to the service centre today, and they said it could cost $3-4k! (They’re going to try to get Subaru to cover the cost - I think because one part failed and triggered the failure of the other part? Unsure - so it might be all covered, or they might just cover the parts, and if that happens it might only be $100-150, which is much more reasonable, but I won’t know how that goes till Monday at the earliest).

I couldn’t even get a couple of weeks after the worst loss I could ever conceive of before life had to throw more bullshit at me.

You could try to make a case for it being life trying to keep me active and present, and stop me from stagnating in my grief, but fuck that. There are good things that could provoke me into action and engagement, it doesn’t have to be bullshit.

That’s the most unfair thing, but it’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is that this isn’t something that has an end. This is something that I have to manage, to some degree or other, for the rest of my life. There’s no, “if I just get through this bit...”, there’s no “and now I’m done”, there’s just an absence, forever.

Mum told me tonight that, not long after dad died, someone she was talking to asked her if she’d marry again. It was soon enough after he died that she was a bit shocked by the suggestion, she was still in the midst of her grief. But she said, she has more sympathy now for that person, because she can understand it better now - that you just want the grieving person to be able to move on and find happiness again.

I can’t even see normal emotions from where I am. I don’t know what it would take to get to happiness. And I don’t know that it’s possible for me to find that kind of happiness again. There’s many reasons why Raq and I called each other our miracles.

*sighs* I could ramble all night, but it’s nearly midnight. I should wipe my eyes, blow my nose, and go brush my teeth. I doubt I’ll fall asleep quickly tonight, but at least I can be in bed and resting.