Dead Letter Department: Grief Anniversaries & All Passion Spent

small achievements

I got a better hummingbird feeder & wood oil for the butcher block countertops, took a giant pile of books to sell at the bookstore & am gradually stocking the rejects in the tiny free library down the street. It felt like time to start some fall cooking up, so last week was smoked paprika pork chops with smashed lemon parmesan potatoes. This week is slow cooker pork shoulder with potatoes & carrots over fresh spinach & a pot of beans for bean & cheese lunch quesadillas. The good apples are back; the best ones are the honeycrisps from Bellewood Acres. Other honeycrisps are fine, but those are truly perfect this time of year. The pile of books to take notes on is dwindling respectably, which means my reading metabolism is working again, and my notebook keeping continues to function.

We’ve finally managed to organize some respite caretaking, which will turn into more frequent caretaking when I travel, for my mom. It’s going to be an adjustment. I have not, for example, done my usual weekly grocery shopping alone since she was staying at the skilled nursing facility in the spring, or left the house without checking in. She’s back to doing a lot of her own house chores herself, which has freed up a ton of time, but the problem solving and scheduling still involves a lot of conversation. That part has surprised me with how tiring it is, the cognitive load to constantly be troubleshooting small issues, the awareness that small issues can so easily turn into large ones. There’s the instinct to just make things as easy I can for her, because I love her, and then the fact that she has to stretch herself, both mentally & physically, in order to keep her functional capacity, let alone increase it over time in the way that would allow her to have a fuller life.

The goal is for me to essentially have the day off when the caregivers are going to be here; the tricky bit is what is work & what is just relational care? It would probably make sense to try to actually be unavailable those days, either in a work deep dive or literally out of the house, to set the precedent, but I don’t quite know how to make it all work yet.

Last week was hard: the second anniversary of my dad’s death, which somehow seemed like it kept happening, because first there was the anticipation of the date, and then there was election day, which was really the spiritual successor, since that was when he died two years ago, and then there was the actual date.

It flattened me. I felt like I was bumping around in a thick bubble of grief and memory, and trying to reach outside of it to all the blue wave joy around me with only the occasional moment of success. I didn’t understand grief anniversaries before, didn’t have one significant enough to break through my usual muddlement about dates and time to inscribe itself on the calendar. Now I do. I did my best to get through it, and am now hauling myself up the other side of that hill with the strong intent to leave the swamp behind for the moment, even if I know it doesn’t go away, will be there next year, or more likely, the next time I’m not looking and step right into it.

But the blue wave did eventually fill me with profound joy, or at least stored it somewhere until I could access it. It was amazing to watch the results rolling in, the hard, hard work paying off in all those places that people wrote off as red forever!!

One of the antitrans ballot measures here did pass, which was painful but not exactly a surprise. It was written in the most confusing way possible, backed by a tremendous amount of money, and everyone has been marinating in antitrans bullshit soup for the past few years, even in supposedly liberal areas, which has fulfilled its purpose of making people susceptible to scaremongering. It’s still painful, and dangerous. I keep thinking about what it must be like for younger trans people, the ones all these panicky school sports measures are about, feeling the weight of the world watching when you’re simply trying to get the fuck through your adolescence, which is already hard enough to do without being the scapegoat for an entire nation. The scrutiny must feel unbearable.

reading room

I finally got into the series P has been obsessed with for some time, Heaven Official’s Blessing, which provides me with the opportunity to live text her my reaction to certain scenes as they are happening, such as, oh no, there really is only one bed, and omg this scene with the dice-throwing and hand-holding is only topped by the suggestiveness of the scene about stroking a sword (not a euphemism, hilariously). I don’t think I’ve read any danmei before, so it all feels really new & fresh to me.

Value Village served me up a pretty copy of All Passion Spent, by Vita Sackville-West, and although I’ve gone through several Virginia Woolf phases & suspect I will go through more, I hadn’t read anything at all by Sackville-West. It was beautiful to see how their writing runs along together and then diverges, the way they must have influenced each other by sharing work. I liked the beginning of it more than the ending—I felt like she reached for something truly revolutionary and fell just short, tamping it back down into approved channels of love and inheritance at almost the last second, in a way that was frustrating. Reading something where the main character is very elderly—and an ordinary, body-failing sort of elderly—was wonderful, though.

Next up is I Cheerfully Refuse, so I can be a part of the Whatcom Reads events for 2027, and I just got a notice that my hold is in at the library, so I should be reporting back soon on that.

More soon, and in the meantime may you find yourself out of your usual genre but having the time of your life.