Writing About Change

This place has turned into a mausoleum. Two years since my last entry, and even more since a commitment to write daily; It was a commitment that, for whatever reason, I didn’t keep. The WordPress interface has changed, my computer has changed, this machine now with it’s loud buttons that I can’t help but notice whenever I press.

I crash my fingers onto them. Too hard.

I’ve written two books in my time away from this place, and rewritten those two books more than twice. They are both fiction. The process of writing them made me feel like an imposter. A creative, excited, unrealistic phony. I did it anyway, even though I felt like a fake. I told myself, “There is nothing fake about writing if you are writing. It doesn’t matter if they get published. Life and pursuits of pleasure can’t be about the outcome.”

I’ve entertained the idea of  returning to writing about myself, to penning another memoir – because I am quite skilled at talking/thinking/writing about myself – but something has held me back.

Perhaps it’s all the change. The overwhelming fear of where to begin. Perhaps it’s that I don’t want certain people to have access to my life, my thoughts, or my troubles (An interesting boundary to have created given my history of boundarilessness).

It’s been a challenging year, this 2018 thing. Birth of a baby. Death of my father. All in one week. But not in that order. First came death, then, life.  Then death again, the Kitty, she died and joined my dad. I’m sure his head exploded when she walked through heaven’s gates – two years ago when we visited Thailand, Dad watched Kitty and she disappeared for six days. Upon our return, he told me she was gone and then the next day, she sauntered back into his house, walked across the living room meowing at him, and slinked up the stairs to the bedroom. We thought maybe she went on Rumspringa, at 13 years old (according to this random cat site, somewhere between 68 and 112 in human years?), and decided that this civilized simple life wasn’t so bad after all. Dad was shocked to see her again; we’d thought she was dead.

Now that she is indeed dead, a death I witnessed, I think of her strolling into his heavenly house, walking across his pearly living room, and slinking up his stairway. I think of him in his chair, baffled at her aloofness. The thought is comforting.

We cleaned out his home, really his garage, which like this blog, was also a mausoleum. The things he’d “won” in the divorce, a Lion King bedspread, a Power Rangers sleeping bag, a box of Christmas lights, all of it stuffed in dark spaces because winning things and not people in divorce is shitty and painful. The things physically blocked the objects he loved, functional objects with wheels and motors covered in grease. My husband dug in and removed the trash, and the trash people took my dad’s winnings to the dump. It turned out that the things that are meaningful to my father’s children, to us, are the things he collected later in life: Pillow covers from Lisboa, a stone statue of three giraffes, an intricately detailed chess board. Things that made him remember his travels and adventures. The time in his life that he lived the fullest, and the most free.

Cancer is such a fucking asshole.

And so now I am revisiting this blog space, writing about change, about how it’s happening, how it’s happened, how nothing we/I could have done would have stopped it from happening; Nothing we could have done would have changed the change. Five months later and the processing continues. Likely for the rest of my life, I’ll be processing the change.

And in that processing, I will show up to life and welcome into my house all the changes that unfold. Even the ones that are fucking assholes. Because it might be that two days after the asshole demolishes the house, as was the case, the most precious change in my entire life might arrive; healthy, happy, and unfazed by the chaos into which she entered.

 

 

Tagged: health, life, spirituality, writing

Posted in: Beautiful Days