Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
So here’s something maybe you didn’t know about grief.
I probably spend less than 1% of my waking time grieving. It does not consume me, mostly because I find other things to think about. Work helps. Having an active fantasy life helps, too, especially if I’m obliged to sit through something that would trigger even a sociopath.
Today, at our monthly meeting attended by most of my Kern County colleagues, I’d made it halfway through a twenty-minute presentation on end-of-life planning (which featured, among others, the woman who did our end-of-life counseling, and signed Karen’s death certificate), and I was doing really well by making sure my head was a million miles away, and pretty much not paying attention. I’m making it sound like I planned it that way. I didn’t. Maybe it was luck, or maybe my subconscious doesn’t hate me nearly as much as I think it hates me. But I was doing okay.
And then my boss turned around and said, “Is this difficult for you?” Wham, pulled me right out of my own head, put me into the moment, and made me fully aware of what was being discussed and who was discussing it. I can’t get angry because she’s my boss, she really does mean well, and I owe her for a lot of things, not least of which — my job, and the fact that she got the psychiatrist to see me two days after Karen died, and damn did I need some good sleepers at that point. All I could say was a tight, “I’m fine, thanks,” and try to get through the remaining minutes of the presentation without bursting into tears in front of everyone.
And she did the same thing four days ago, at our annual dinner dance. Once again, I was doing a reasonably good job ignoring the fact that damn near everyone was there with their spouse, and I was there fucking ALONE, and I was doing a reasonably good job not having this kill me by being someplace else in my head. At one point I slinked off to a quieter place to text message a friend. That’s when my boss decided the whole thing must be terribly depressing for me, and she came over to talk to me about it, which reminded me of just what a bad move I’d made coming to this thing in the first place. I’d been doing okay, up to that point.
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: be careful where and when you give support, because you might be doing something that’s kind of the antithesis of support.
D.
