Mondayest Friday Ever

Lucky me, I got a lifetime supply of Skull-Splitting Headaches of Various Forms, Dimensions, and Points of Origin for my eighth birthday or so. After decades of trying every manner of remedy to get them under control (including shredding my stomach lining with NSAIDs), I found a neurologist that takes me seriously and is primarily dedicated to improving my quality of life.

Which means, I see him every couple of months to get shot in the head four times.

Yesterday was the day. I get occipital nerve blocks which involve injecting cortisone and lidocaine into an area of my occipital ridge (at the back of the head). This calms the nerve malformation that causes the headaches that I get from sleeping on my pillow wrong – any of which then tend to trigger other types of headaches including aura-presenting migraines and atypical trigeminal attacks. We call those latter ones “squid attacks” because it feels like the entire side of my head is being squeezed by tentacles and injected with fire, salt, pain, and misery, lasting anywhere from eight hours to three days, switching sides regularly, and making things like sleep impossible. It’s an ongoing nerve pain that is unrelenting and horrible. They’re called suicide headaches for a reason.

So, Sorry It’s Friday

It took me much longer than usual to get out of bed this morning because the day after the occipital block triggers a small headache that must be carefully coddled in order to not turn into something Unmanageable.

When I did get up, I realized that there were multiple things that demanded all of my attention. The kitten needed to get her exam and spaying appointments made. J needed a psychiatrist appointment confirmed. I had to schedule a bunch of payments, track down our new mortgage provider (seriously, this is getting stupid), and also build out a bunch of stuff for a new venture. (I’ll post more about that later, but it means you might be able to see me in the face in a professional sense.)

But, in typical Monday fashion, everything happened all at once, including being on the phone with both medical offices while Daniel was free-roaming for PT session, and then all heck breaking loose with the in-and-out the door, cats and dogs getting displaced, madcap mayhem…

NOT typical Friday behaviors.

Processing the Grief

I mentioned last time that one of my oldest and dearest friends died suddenly just a couple of weeks ago (January 20), and his family held his interment of ashes on his birthday, February 3. He would have only been 53.

I am no stranger to death and grief, but I am also not immune to feelings of loss and sorrow. I don’t know if I could say that it gets easier with repeated experiences, but I feel like having gone through soul-crushing heartache more than once at least provides a reasonable roadmap. I know that one day, it won’t hurt so bad, that pivoting into love and gratitude is the eventual answer, and that there are specific and certain things that we can do to aid (but not hurry) our process.

Funerals are for the living. The dead person is dead, and even if they’re hanging around to see who shows up (I’m looking at you, Aunt Niecy), the ritual is about helping the survivors move past that first critical stage of grief, Denial. By seeing the body (or evidence of the body), by facing proof of mortality, we are allowed to tell Denial that it’s okay, that it’s done its job protecting us from the horrible truth long enough for us to get mentally prepared for actual processing.

If we stay in Denial, we do stupid things, like suddenly try to call them out of the blue, send a text message, swing by their house, but because we haven’t processed that they’re gone, the dam of anguish breaks and we are body-slammed into unrelenting panic at that absence. And make no mistake, the quality of that reaction is akin to (if not exactly) panic. It is the onset of a kind of terror, an immediate and unregulated response to a very unpleasant surprise, and it is not your friend mentally, emotionally, or physiologically.

So, I went to the memorial, and the tears finally came in a somewhat moderated fashion. I chatted with a person on the periphery, but I couldn’t bring myself to try to reconnect with his family or friends because… I know myself too well, and I would be trying to stitch together the pieces of his entire life from the last moment I saw him literally years ago, and it would consume me and invoke feelings of loss and regret and sadness that, frankly, were antithetical to his very existence.

Because he was a ham, and a joker, and an absolute punster. I wore my ghostly “This Is Boo Sheet” t-shirt because that’s what he would have appreciated.

And he probably does think this is bullshit and that he got clocked too soon. There was, apparently, no indication of illness or anything like that, and – again, I deliberately did not ask because my forensics brain would put all the things together, go through his house with a fine-tooth comb to determine the cause of death, try to find someone to blame, someone to shame, someone to beat into a bloody pulp for denying the world another thirty, forty, fifty years of the gentlest, sweetest, smartest, funniest giant.

And… that’s Anger, and that’s Bargaining, and while those rational processes do need to happen – those questions must be answered by us, for us, in our context – we are not obligated to stay in those stages for very long. Not all aspects of grieving are necessary equal per a given loss.

Weird Feels

One of the defining features of any individual’s grief experience is that the things that trigger the intense emotional reactions – and this goes especially for autistic people who do not usually experience emotion in an unbroken continuum – are very rarely predictable.

I found myself in a fit of absolute rage and fury because everything I need to cook keeps getting put out of my reach, as I am a short woman in a house full of tall people. Okay, but I have a step-stool, but that’s not the point. He was 6′ 4″, and when we thought we’d be partners for life, he made the biggest deal out of putting things out of my reach and then lifting me up to get them because he could. He was a “tighten all the jars so you have to come to me for help” kind of guy, and not in a needy way, just to be funny and affectionate.

He was a master chef, too, and traveled all over the country opening restaurants and training other cooks, and now every time I make dinner, I’m back in the kitchen with him. Sometimes it makes me feel closer to him, and sometimes I have to cut up an onion without my swim goggles to hide the sobs, even if the recipe doesn’t call for it.

I started writing a story in a vain attempt to distract myself, and it came out with a whole other universe attached to it. He will, of course, be a key figure in that universe when it gets fleshed out the rest of the way, because that is the only way I know to truly immortalize someone.

And if anyone deserves to be immortalized, it’s him. He wasn’t perfect – no one is – but he was strong and passionate and so goddamned smart.

And if I let myself be quiet for just a moment, I can hear him laughing at some ridiculous thing. Sometimes that makes me weep, but more often now, it makes me smile.

And I think he’d like that.