She raised me with many amazing stories from Grimm’s fairytales to Madeleine L’Engle. Michael Ende and J M Barre were the storytellers which taught me to love reading and left in my heart the joys of literature through stories of adventure & growth.
J.M Barre’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden and Peter Pang and Wendy. Michel Ende’s Momo and Eliot Pepe’s Ensorcelled
It is with great pleasure I read Eliot Peper’s enchanting novella Ensorcelled. It’s part coming of age story meetings great adventure in the wilds and a delight for young at heart & young readers of literature.
I don’t know if he meant it as a story to be enjoyed by children, as it was such a delight for me as an adult that I went through it in one sitting. Though I do think it would be wonderful reading for young people.
It’s a beautiful printing so you might be inclined to want to keep it pristine but it’s perfect for an afternoon outside. Maybe go touch grass with it in hand. Find the enchantment for yourself.
I’ve been a fan of Peper’s science fiction so it was a real change of pace to see his range. I felt lucky to have an early copy and I genuinely enjoyed its spirit. I went I was going to read a near future thriller and got joy & delight. Which I very much needed.
Clearly this is not optimal and we should find our own Jungian stories to free us to reach our own future without the literal end of our fathers. But if one has to suffer this loss then I’ll make the best of it.
I am giving myself till the end of the day to feel the anger, pain and frustration that has come to define the grieving process I am in. I lost my father quite recently and it has been an awful experience.
After the memorial ends at 5pm today I intend to let go of what I can even though I know I don’t have full control over it. I had little to do with it at all.
I won’t lie about how much this experience has hurt. I was able to handle a few emotional body blows as I know my father and I have forgiven him a thousand times over for any pain and trauma as it got me here.
That my father struggled to forgive himself seemed a given to me and I intended to extend whatever grace was necessary to those who carried him through his final years.
In grief, whatever one has to do to the villains you have built in your head is alright by me. It hurt but I don’t think I am hurting as much as someone who would do this. I am doing what I can to not become inflamed by it. These choices are what was deemed necessary.
I do however think we are unprepared for the many private painful emotional moments that will come with the fourth turning as baby boomers pass and their children across modern families grapple with what was broken and its costs.
I consider myself to be incredibly lucky in this regard as I knew it was coming. I am less sure we are prepared as a civilization for the pain that will arrive as more change and death arrives.
It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.
It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.
Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.
We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.
Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder
In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.
He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.
The Far Side Computer Calendae
Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.
Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.
Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.
Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.
There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.
Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.
My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.
She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.
My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.
I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.
I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.
My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.
Maybe it was taking a Fluconazole after my doctor notice some tearing “downstairs” at my annual physical when he was checking out my surgical scar from July.
Maybe it’s that I am on my seventh session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and the results starting to compound. Protocols say it takes about ten to feel a difference and my full protocol will be sixty so I’ve got a ways to go.
Maybe it’s just the absolutely gorgeous fall weather filtering in the perfect amount of light for that ideal temperate middle ground of low heat and humidity that makes being outside a joy.
Maybe it’s just a fluke. But today I feel almost human again.
I felt joy in being the adult responsible for running the household today. I managed loads of laundry, housekeeping, a proper grooming session of my own body, a grocery run into town, a decent workout, and of course, time in the hyperbaric chamber.
My husband is still struggling mightily with whatever combination of infections, stress, and post-viral damage is ripping up his immune response. He is usually the one caring for me. But today I was able to care for us both.
My immediate family is in poor shape. Health troubles across almost everyone along with varying degrees of emotional stress.
One tries to responsibly pursue “restorative” activities that give you back energy like meditation, light exercise or movement, and if you happen to be lucky like we are some supplemental oxygen.
The various efforts of relaxation techniques like non-sleep deep relaxation. Box breathing to interoception still has the baseline stress metrics you’d expect of a serious illness or a loss.
Being a victim in your own life is a choice. We get dealt a hand of cards and we have a say in how we play it even if it’s a crappy hand. The odds being what they are you probably got dealt some bad cards.
I’ve learned the most about empathy from the men in my life. It’s not always true for women but being raised to accommodate is part of being the weaker sex. One need not always accommodate in life though. Sometimes their problems just not about you at all. And that is ultimately alright. Everyone hurts including you.
Of course it’s unwise to reinforce a victim mindset in people, but sometimes people actually just have been victimized, sometimes repeatedly and brutally, and lasering in on their small slice of responsibility just reinforces their pervasive sense of being totally alone. At some point you hope they look at their patterns and see if change is possible. But if they’re going to get there, it’s going to be because someone was kind enough to sit with them, believe them and hold space for them until they were ready. VividVoid
Letting someone see you in the way that they need to see you has its purpose. It’s a beautiful thing to sit quietly and let someone really blame you. Be disliked. Letting someone who has genuinely got shit going on just be furious at you is a form of empathy. Be their villain.
I’m learning to sit comfortably while being someone’s villain. If that’s what they need in their hardest hour I can be that. It’s not something you should give too freely but this is where boundaries are a blessing.
I’ve seen more men than women be capable of handling this kind of rejection. The empathy of not engaging. Let them be hurt. You can suck if they need it. I believe it’s a strength to cultivate comfort being the bad guy
Every parent learns to do it, anyone with responsibility for making a goal or a bottom line or a budget work knows that sometimes you just have to be the bad guy to make it work.
The parameters of all of that is hard and we are reworking our way through helping people overcome their hurt. We’ve let cultural expectations dictate so much.
Everyone is fighting their own hardest battle and if you let them be mad at you and don’t take it personally you just might help.
We spent a long time at the doctor’s yesterday as Alex and I gutted it out with our excellent physician (with AI assists) through a myriad of different tests. We were attempting to figure out why he keeps getting respiratory infections and why I’m such a tasty treat to skin bacteria.
What I don’t seem to be able to improve is my low testosterone and the flavors of migraine headache that come with the roller coaster of my luteal phase. Which is presumably a clue and we are following it.
Astonishingly my lady hormones are in tip top shape. Though the “you should have no trouble getting pregnant if we can get off the medicines that stabilize you” remarks remains a heads trip. Yes I asked.
It is not a head trip that makes one’s husband enthusiastic about the prospect. Which is fair, as we have no family support, no backup plans for me regressing physically, and the family that does support us can’t get to America. So one can see why a CEO husband with sick investor wife who would have to give up work, plus potentially messed up baby, isn’t super appealing. Anyways! TFR is a fun topic.
I started with basic supplements in the precursor category like DHEA and STRO about a year ago when my testosterone came in at a 2 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) when it should be somewhere between 9 to 55 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL). For context, adult men typically have levels in the 240–950 ng/dL.
The one sticky widget is that my testosterone remains stubbornly low. You wouldn’t think such a raging “see you next Tuesday” such as myself would be overburdened with the feminine hormones and lacking in ball buster hormones but I am.
For the past 8 weeks I’ve been using a testosterone cream that clicks up your dose and you rub it between your thighs. I know it’s gross. So I was curious to see where I might land. And praise the Lord I am now at 15 ng/dL. From 2 to 5 to 15 is some excellent progress but still below where we’d like me to hit. So we are going to run another test and try out the tiny pellets they slice into your skin. Since I’m already used to scalpels and antibiotics I figure why not?
I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.
As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests
It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.
There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.
Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.
I’m OK To Go
I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.
When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.
The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.
Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”
The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.
We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.
The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.
I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.
Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.
Someone acquired a new piebald
Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.
The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.
I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.
I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.
What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.
