Why be everything to everyone when you can be nothing to everyone?
I have a colleague I used to really like.
His wife, whom I also loved, got into a very serious car wreck.
Her health declined so much, they sold their family business and moved two counties away. They’ve since sold that house and moved two thousand miles away.
I don’t enjoy interacting with him anymore. He’s very stone-cold sarcastic and it’s not even funny.
I ghostwrite for him, among several others. And that’s not even my job. I’m a department head.
Any questions I ask are met with silence or sarcasm. Or absolutely circular nonsense.
I miss the days of hanging out on the weekend with him and his wife. Of darkening each other’s doorways with stories and wishes and how we’d make that place better if anyone would listen to us.
Even K-money said some of the stories I tell her now, don’t even sound like the same person.
We agreed it’s grief. He’s a caregiver now. It’s hard to be everything to everyone. Shit, it’s hard to be ANYthing to ANYone.
Happy to be nothing to no one. Now THAT I’m good at!
Shan’s going through some stuff too. I told her about something I read.
Which the TL;DR was that grief is a 24/7 job. You wake up sad. You go to bed sad. You go through every life activity sad.
Like, I love these furry little dipshits in my house, right?
It occurred to me the other day that my Momma petted them. That she knew my babies, and she loved on them.
And the fur that my hands touch … HER hands once touched.
That’s a small comfort when you know you’ll never touch your Momma again.
I may grumble about work sometimes. But first of all, who doesn’t? And second of all, it ain’t NOTHING like the bullshit I’ve either posted about or killed myself to NOT post about over the years.
But they’ve let me go from being a shitty caregiver and worker to just being a shitty worker.
Same with my friend. I’m not saying he’s a shitty caregiver and worker. But I am saying that he’s going through Some Shit and I imagine I’m not the only one trying to keep things running that I shouldn’t be wholly responsible for.
Like, I hired Grant to help him. Grant fucked me over so bad — I got the company owner to pay him way more than the role was worth. Then Grant took another job two months later.
Then I hired Karen to help him. She was cheaper than Grant, but I just thought she sucked at her job because I rewrote everything she turned in.
After I fired her, I realized trying to get a truly helpful thought out of this guy anymore is trying to squeeze a turnip.
But still, I write the weekly newsletter, and I do it in two hours vs her two days.
I was told I had an attitude about this product. It was in my review the week before Mom died.
Yes I did have an attitude and I was also spending more time working than caregiving and now I drown in grief about how bad a caregiver I was.
And yes this product still ruins every Friday of my life.
So to hear two years later that my attitude is still there but has improved, I was gobsmacked.
Like, a THANK YOU would have been the correct answer here.
I say this as it’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday and I need to finish writing this masterpiece before tomorrow … when my friend will do his new thing of sending me an AI-generated table of whatever Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are thinking today. Information that is USELESS to me.
In any event, I don’t squawk because I know where he is. And where he will be. Whenever that day comes.
But here in the quiet of my house …
As I think about how I wish I’d just been a better caregiver and not worried so much about work … because my brain chemistry was altering and would go on to alter a whole bunch more …
I think not just about the fact that I lost Mom and could have done better by her.
But also how I lost everybody.
Mom. Gram. Grampy. Old Gram. Sia. Janna. Elaine. Aunt Lenna. Uncle Stan. Aunt Josie. Cousin Dana. Aunt Marion. Sue. Jane. Jesse. At least two Johns. Lynn. Larry. Leanne. Jason.
And that’s just the hoomins. The ones I can remember offhand.
I mean, not all warrant the deep grief. But enough do.
Then there are the relationships and friendships that didn’t make it out alive either.
Not to mention the dreams. Whether for me, for us, for them. All gone. Poof.
I was so frustrated that Mom was so damn sad. Like, it ruined my good time on more than one occasion.
But she at least had me to suck it up for. I don’t have to impress anyone. And I don’t. Impress, that is.
And I’m such an iconoclast at work that it’s hard to hold me accountable. I’m like Ken whose job is “Beach.” No one knows what that means but also no one else does it.
Anyway, as ever, I’m just sad and messed up and I don’t think there’s any coming back from this.
But is there moving forward from this?
I will literally die trying, methinks.