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juushikaTW cancer, death.
As anticipated, my parents confirmed a few days ago (the 20th?) that my father is ending curative treatment and switching to palliative care. He's working through a local hospice, with the goal of staying in-home as much as possible and, ideally, throughout the process. We're looking at 4-6 weeks until he dies.
He says that, according to hospice workers he's talked with, the end is easier and faster if the patient has accepted death. So much of this is a mental process—for all of us. Acceptance and grief have not been linear. I thought I had done a lot of work to come to terms with things, and I had; but now it feels real in a way it didn't before—and it very much felt real, then. My family anticipates me being the weak link, the not-strong one, on account of my mental illness, which is accurate and appreciated. But I still owe it to him not to make my suffering another burden on his experience. It's complicated.
Miscellaneous and related:
The apartment we most were interested in got nabbed right before we made a decision, which means compromising and/or starting from scratch, so Dev & I have mostly decided against the move. The pros and cons are so evenly weighted that the tipping point is simple inertia: commutes either way, but getting me home is more accessible in the current arrangement; stress of money/moving is roughly equivalent to stress of being in this house; not moving gives us more disposable income for quality of life improvements. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We have such a limited window to tackle this before Devon is neck-deep in a busy final term & I'm lost to the crazy that it will almost definitely not happen, but it was a nice fantasy while it lasted.
Missy/Teja/my California frando finally sent me some packages of things from his cast-offs (bedsheets! two sets of modal bedsheets!) and touristing (pokemon plush!) and misc. (chocolate!) that he's been holding onto for in some cases multiple literal years; the two boxes were separated in transit & arrived yesterday (21st) and, fingers crossed, later today. There could be no better time for a care package—the anticipation of arrival and concrete evidence of love & support has been a light in some dark dark darkness.
The above ^ has had me thinking about using the "if we don't move, more disposable income" money to figure out like a ... dead dad advent calendar? A list of small, relatively frequent things to look forward to. One of the things making the next few months so hard is the perfect storm of awful—of houseguests & school & terminal illness overlapping such that there is literally no relief, no counterbalance. It's endless, it's 6 weeks-4 months of things being 100% shit all the time. Things after that will be bad, too—I cannot conceive of healing from this grief. It took me a decade to heal past college, and I'm still not quite done—and that was different; not, in some ways, smaller, but still smaller. But when I'm doing that longterm work, it will be less complicated by other egregiously bad things.
So if packages help, maybe other things can help? I don't know how to combat andohenia & the fact that I almost never consume media on release schedules. Can I make "obtain game/show/book" something on that list when there's an infinite backlog of relatively easy to obtain game/show/book, and when consuming a thing comes to feel like joyless work? ??? What "stuff" can I obtain instead, while maintaining a moderate budget & while I anticipate future moving and generally dislike having stuff? Do I have to exclude autumnal activities like "make applesauce" and "go on walks" on account of the agoraphobia? What's the item to activity balance? Anticipation is much of the distraction, the most accessible (so far) emotion that isn't sadness—what are concrete things that require a modicum of waiting?
A list of potentials:
- BPAL (got back into wearing my extensive, beautiful, aged collection lately—autumn/winter are their best months—this is both budgetable & small/easy to transport)
- buy TV show that isn't on Netflix/which we've been unwilling to pirate (Star Trek: Discovery? Hannibal s3? Killing Eve?)
- black teddy bear (I got a new teddy for my birthday whom I fucking love; I now have all my dream teddies except for black teddy bear & backpack teddy bear)
replace eyes on some preexisting teddy bears/make bowties for some teddy bears/modify my own backpack or bag teddy
- reinstitute weekly date night
- obscure books which have been too obscure to obtain without ordering
- Pokemon dream plush (whimsicott? cottonee? commission a lifesize? commission a shiny beta pokemon?)
- Critical Role s2; binge enough to catch up & look forward to weekly shows?
- any new games that I do care to play on release (makes me wish that literally anything were coming out this year. I'd even put "buy a Switch" on this list if there were!)
- track down these Bebe figures
- TBR of rereads/things I don't need to review/spoopy and autumnal books
- regular coffee outtings (on way to/after trips home, sometimes?)
(suggestions sincerely welcome; I don't expect any, I've been largely content to talk into a void & about books most of the time, and advice for coping with loss of a parent is impossible to give but especially to a somewhat-stranger online! but in this one particular, suggestions for easy and frivolous sources of joy would be fantastic)
TBH putting energy into just the brainstorming is probably productive, despite my general disinclination towards preemptive investment. It's hard to tell, given that I'm so profoundly crazy, that I have so many & such productive coping mechanisms. "Distraction" is a double-edged coping mechanism—it's so often a way of not-coping, instead of providing space to cope, and has attendant problems like addiction/depersonalization. But what I'm facing is so awful that I'm not worried about negative side-effects; any problems that arise from my attempts to cope can only be smaller than the problems I'm facing; there is nothing bigger than this. Wasting time brainstorming ways to be happy? Still productive, if I am for the moment less sad.
The hardest work I need to do is to balance that against going home, being there; being uncomfortable and maybe sad there, being reminded—I do need to inhabit this as it happens, for my sake and my family's sake and my dad's sake, and because it doesn't go away if I don't go home. All I'll do is miss the time we have left.
Absolutely am going to hem my new PJ pants/buy some new lounge pants. I don't need to be presentable and outward-facing when I go home, especially not if I'm doing it for longer lengths of time. I just need to be there.
As anticipated, my parents confirmed a few days ago (the 20th?) that my father is ending curative treatment and switching to palliative care. He's working through a local hospice, with the goal of staying in-home as much as possible and, ideally, throughout the process. We're looking at 4-6 weeks until he dies.
He says that, according to hospice workers he's talked with, the end is easier and faster if the patient has accepted death. So much of this is a mental process—for all of us. Acceptance and grief have not been linear. I thought I had done a lot of work to come to terms with things, and I had; but now it feels real in a way it didn't before—and it very much felt real, then. My family anticipates me being the weak link, the not-strong one, on account of my mental illness, which is accurate and appreciated. But I still owe it to him not to make my suffering another burden on his experience. It's complicated.
Miscellaneous and related:
The apartment we most were interested in got nabbed right before we made a decision, which means compromising and/or starting from scratch, so Dev & I have mostly decided against the move. The pros and cons are so evenly weighted that the tipping point is simple inertia: commutes either way, but getting me home is more accessible in the current arrangement; stress of money/moving is roughly equivalent to stress of being in this house; not moving gives us more disposable income for quality of life improvements. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We have such a limited window to tackle this before Devon is neck-deep in a busy final term & I'm lost to the crazy that it will almost definitely not happen, but it was a nice fantasy while it lasted.
Missy/Teja/my California frando finally sent me some packages of things from his cast-offs (bedsheets! two sets of modal bedsheets!) and touristing (pokemon plush!) and misc. (chocolate!) that he's been holding onto for in some cases multiple literal years; the two boxes were separated in transit & arrived yesterday (21st) and, fingers crossed, later today. There could be no better time for a care package—the anticipation of arrival and concrete evidence of love & support has been a light in some dark dark darkness.
The above ^ has had me thinking about using the "if we don't move, more disposable income" money to figure out like a ... dead dad advent calendar? A list of small, relatively frequent things to look forward to. One of the things making the next few months so hard is the perfect storm of awful—of houseguests & school & terminal illness overlapping such that there is literally no relief, no counterbalance. It's endless, it's 6 weeks-4 months of things being 100% shit all the time. Things after that will be bad, too—I cannot conceive of healing from this grief. It took me a decade to heal past college, and I'm still not quite done—and that was different; not, in some ways, smaller, but still smaller. But when I'm doing that longterm work, it will be less complicated by other egregiously bad things.
So if packages help, maybe other things can help? I don't know how to combat andohenia & the fact that I almost never consume media on release schedules. Can I make "obtain game/show/book" something on that list when there's an infinite backlog of relatively easy to obtain game/show/book, and when consuming a thing comes to feel like joyless work? ??? What "stuff" can I obtain instead, while maintaining a moderate budget & while I anticipate future moving and generally dislike having stuff? Do I have to exclude autumnal activities like "make applesauce" and "go on walks" on account of the agoraphobia? What's the item to activity balance? Anticipation is much of the distraction, the most accessible (so far) emotion that isn't sadness—what are concrete things that require a modicum of waiting?
A list of potentials:
- BPAL (got back into wearing my extensive, beautiful, aged collection lately—autumn/winter are their best months—this is both budgetable & small/easy to transport)
- buy TV show that isn't on Netflix/which we've been unwilling to pirate (Star Trek: Discovery? Hannibal s3? Killing Eve?)
- black teddy bear (I got a new teddy for my birthday whom I fucking love; I now have all my dream teddies except for black teddy bear & backpack teddy bear)
replace eyes on some preexisting teddy bears/make bowties for some teddy bears/modify my own backpack or bag teddy
- reinstitute weekly date night
- obscure books which have been too obscure to obtain without ordering
- Pokemon dream plush (whimsicott? cottonee? commission a lifesize? commission a shiny beta pokemon?)
- Critical Role s2; binge enough to catch up & look forward to weekly shows?
- any new games that I do care to play on release (makes me wish that literally anything were coming out this year. I'd even put "buy a Switch" on this list if there were!)
- track down these Bebe figures
- TBR of rereads/things I don't need to review/spoopy and autumnal books
- regular coffee outtings (on way to/after trips home, sometimes?)
(suggestions sincerely welcome; I don't expect any, I've been largely content to talk into a void & about books most of the time, and advice for coping with loss of a parent is impossible to give but especially to a somewhat-stranger online! but in this one particular, suggestions for easy and frivolous sources of joy would be fantastic)
TBH putting energy into just the brainstorming is probably productive, despite my general disinclination towards preemptive investment. It's hard to tell, given that I'm so profoundly crazy, that I have so many & such productive coping mechanisms. "Distraction" is a double-edged coping mechanism—it's so often a way of not-coping, instead of providing space to cope, and has attendant problems like addiction/depersonalization. But what I'm facing is so awful that I'm not worried about negative side-effects; any problems that arise from my attempts to cope can only be smaller than the problems I'm facing; there is nothing bigger than this. Wasting time brainstorming ways to be happy? Still productive, if I am for the moment less sad.
The hardest work I need to do is to balance that against going home, being there; being uncomfortable and maybe sad there, being reminded—I do need to inhabit this as it happens, for my sake and my family's sake and my dad's sake, and because it doesn't go away if I don't go home. All I'll do is miss the time we have left.
Absolutely am going to hem my new PJ pants/buy some new lounge pants. I don't need to be presentable and outward-facing when I go home, especially not if I'm doing it for longer lengths of time. I just need to be there.
