Aside: October was a pretty shit month for me.

October was a pretty shit month for me.

There’s not really any other way to put it, in my thinking, but I’ll try to elaborate.

1*ZTLar54jatZLIJn2CVmQKADad died a month ago. For all of the getting ready and expecting the end that we were all told to do time and time again by any robotic medical professional that ended up on dad’s case, I really got sucker punched when I saw it happen.

We’ll leave how I did or didn’t need to see that happen for the professional mental critics to consider.

It hasn’t hit me until now that he was one of the reasons my family stayed together. Over the natural course of family life, it’s natural for children to leave the home and go somewhere to do something. Raise a family, fight a war, start a business — but all of that takes place away from home, right?

It sounds bad to admit this, but dad’s cancer was one of the only things tethering me to home over the last few years. The worse it got, the more guilty I started to feel about not being there to help.

Whether my being there would’ve helped things is an entire other matter to think about, that I’m not even prepared to think about. The self-doubt about whether I should have left home at that time or not is still something that staggers me when I try to think about it.

My mother made a joke about me moving back home to help pay for the mortgage. And after almost getting over that whole thing after dad died, I just lost it. I can’t even begin to think that several incidents wouldn’t have happened if I were at the house, just there to help.

I don’t know. I was — and still am, for what it’s worth — happy being alone and not having to worry about things complicating my life. I was just starting to really work exercise into my routine, as well. I just want to do my own thing.
Moving out just felt right to me. And even in the first house that I moved out to, was pretty neat. I have pretty cool roommates who tolerate my special brand of idiocy and I usually find a way to contribute to the common good of the house without ending up being completely worthless.

There’s always a schedule to keep and a time to be quiet everywhere I go. I wear headphones all the time — even at work — because I fear the clashing of what I like to listen to when I’m at the office or the games that I play to be too loud to piss off my coworkers or my roommates.

I’m starting to think that I’m losing some sort of awareness sometimes as a result of trying to keep everything bottled up inside my head. Every so often the wrong chord progression or the most dramatic moment in a story will punch me in the gut until my eyes start to water. I gives me the strongest urge to play music again, but I can’t shake the fact that the group I want to play with will probably never exist. I make up random melodies in my head to distract me from everything that I would otherwise think about.
To pile on to all of that, my dad’s father passed last week. I haven’t had a real conversation with the man for over a decade as a result of his progressed Alzheimer’s, but I knew he had gotten used to doing things his way for so long that he wasn’t about to let anyone tell him what to do.

Perhaps that rebellious streak kicked the rate of memory loss into overdrive — or at least it appeared. Towards the end, he never recognized me even after introducing myself as “Jim’s oldest” time after time. I was mistaken for my father, once, because of how similar we looked, and thankfully he didn’t make that mistake after dad died. I was certain I was going to lose it if he had.
Moving forward from all of this isn’t going to be the easiest thing. As we have no other legal recourse but to deal with dad’s brothers, settling grandfather’s estate and scheduling a time to have my grandfather buried is causing a headache of its own. That’s all I should probably say about that.

As the second week of November draws to a close, it’s probably safe to say that I have a 80% wrap on everything going on in my head. I don’t think that I’ll be mentally altogether again for a little while, especially with the holiday season and dad’s birthday coming up in a month.

I’m just hoping to continue operating as a slightly overweight and alone human being that enjoys gaming. That is, if all of that’s not a bad thing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.