Well that's a fucking kick in the teeth.

When life hands you lemons, you juice them right into a fucking cocktail.

Trigger and content warning: This post talks about death, grief, and loss.

Hey, fuckers. Bet you thought you were rid of me.

Truth is I’ve been mired in a swamp of fucktangular life shit that has had me mostly mentally upside down for many, many months, white-knuckling the lap bar on whatever this broke-ass roller coaster we call life is.

I’m kind of a country western song lately; my dog died on fucking CHRISTMAS (simultaneously shattering the heart of my child who had loved him most of her life), my mom died in March after 6 months in hospice care following many years of illness, this week my company laid people off and while I wasn’t affected, many I love were, and that’s all on the tail of a year at work where I dealt with assholes galore trying, in various ways, to fuck me over.

In the midst of that freight train of fuckery cars, I’ve mostly been doing…not great?

I wish I could paint you a rosy fucking picture of resilience and silver linings and all the lessons I’m surely supposed to learn in the midst of this. I’m confident that I’m supposed to make some inspirational content on LinkedIn or whatever about death and life and something about the journey, but to be honest, I don’t have the fucks to give. About any of it.

The parts that people don’t tell you about grief are that it doesn’t always come in wracking sobs. I think that was the most fucked up, disorienting part. I’ve mostly felt numb. Like I can’t be bothered to care. I’m going through the motions, doing all the adult responsibility shit like keeping my kid and animals alive, showing up to work, paying my bills.

But there’s just no fucking sparkle. In any of it. I wake up, I do the things, and I just want to crawl back into bed and sleep until it stops hurting.

Truth is, Pammie Jo (that’s my mom, otherwise known as Pam) would be pissed at me for moping. She’d be hollering about the fact that’s she’s cosmos dust now (and also literal dust in the box on my mantle) and I should suck it the fuck up and go do things with my kid and not be sad because she lived her life and I should live mine. Sentiment wasn’t a big thing in my family, can you tell? I'm the black sheep in that regard.

Gallows humor has helped; I mean, how the fuck do you traverse the nightmares of having to live an Adult Life without making fun of the bleak and dark? For example, I was oddly bothered by having a Box o’ Mom on the mantle because it’s just fucking morbid. And I have a Box o’ Ruthie (my gramma who died in 2016), too, that we found in a fucking closet in my mom’s house (see earlier note about family sentiment).

Before she was also dust in a ziploc bag inside a box, Ruthie used to have one of those concrete porch goose things named Matilda. For the uninitiated, these are literal concrete goose figurines that are life size, and the thing to do was apparently buy them jaunty fucking outfits for the seasons and holidays. I always thought it was funny and weird, but Ruthie thought it was amazing, so we went with it and she had quite a wardrobe for Matilda. In that spirit, I decided that maybe Box o’ Mom needed to be festooned for holidays to make it at least a little darkly hilarious to have her sitting above my fireplace. So. Here she was for Easter in her bunny ears.

Everyone tells you that there isn’t a “right way” to grieve. They tell you to be kind to yourself, to be gentle and patient with your heart, to take whatever time you need. What I’ve learned is that while all that is true, grief is also just messy as fuck. One day I’m fine. The next day I’m brought to my knees in my mom’s living room because her chair is empty or recalling how traumatic her death was despite hospice (COPD is awful, kids, please don’t smoke). The one after that I’m cackling about some ridiculous shit she said to me, or shaking my head at the random IT consultations I was forced to do on her laptop, or remembering the time she passed out drunk in my apartment hallway in Milwaukee because she had too much chardonnay after our symphony date.

I think the best descriptor I had was from a friend who reminded me that we don’t get past the grief. It just becomes part of us. If grief is just love with no place to go, we grow around it and with it and it just becomes part of who and what we are and we are forever changed by it. And as anyone who has been there knows, change can be incredibly painful and beautiful and gut-wrenching all at the same time.

So I’m a fucking mess, mostly. I’m trying to be less messy, even a little bit, with each passing day. Yesterday I failed. Today I’m better. Tomorrow, who knows. Maybe Mom would be delighted that she’s all tangled up with me now in ways that mean I can never forget to call her again because she is just part of me. Maybe that really is her that I can feel brushing through the room when my chest hurts so much from the loss. Maybe.

She was a fan of Dear Fuckers, read every issue, and was the original source of my thorough training in cursing, swearing and artful word fuckery. She was a delight and a pain in my ass and would probably be pleased as punch to be the main character for this issue, but I’m not at all sure she’d endorse the bunny ears. But I know she would love knowing all of you are out there, sharing a bit of her with me, if nothing else to comfort the hole in my heart for a few extra moments today. So thanks for that.

In the days before she died, Mom asked me how my writing was going. We were talking about work stuff because she always was interested my career. I confessed that it really…hadn’t been because the months had been so hard and I couldn’t seem to find a lot of words.

She knew *exactly* what she was asking, by the way. She absolutely knew. She just stared at me and waited.

“MOM. You did NOT just ‘dying wish’ me about my writing!”

That grin. The innocent eye roll. The signature laugh. The head tilt and knowing look that silently asked “Well?”

What a total Mom move. She had mastered that shit over a lifetime and dropped the mic at the absolute 11th hour. Humor wrapped around the loving demand that I don’t surrender. Like a fucking queen.

I guess I’ll be over here getting back to writing then. So, messy heart and all, hopefully I’ll see you fuckers very soon.