Exhaustion

I'm physically and emotionally exhausted right now.  Fortunately, I've got a three day weekend ahead of me, so I am looking forward to some serious recovery time.  I need to just get off the grid and sleep, eat, stare at the wall, listen to music, and wander in the forest for a while. I need several nights of good sleep and the opportunity to pivot back to my normal sleep schedule, which has been wholly disrupted the last months/weeks as we went through the dying process with my friend.

Anyone who has been through that process knows how exhausting it can be, between the emotional and physical requirements, it is one tough road.  The road is done though. In the aftermath of such events you're glad that your friend is no longer suffering. There is a sense of relief - relief in that their suffering is over and relief that the particular journey, for everyone involved is over.

Mainly, I just need to curl up and sleep, so I am heading off work to do that in exactly eighteen minutes.  (LOL even in a state of exhaustion I am still borderline OCD and need to stop work at the top or bottom of the hour.)

I've been avoiding work meetings today and avoiding commenting when I am in those meetings because I know that the filter between what I am thinking and what I will say is, at this point, badly damaged. I did manage to get some work done, but I have fallen behind on other projects, so there is a lot of stuff that has been simply stacking up. 

I also know, from prior experience, that when I am in this state of exhaustion I am prone to react disproportionately to things.  Things that would normally roll off my back - won't.  Things that would normally not bother me - do. It's kind of a dangerous place to be.

Over the years I have seen the damage that families can do to each other as they go through the dying and grieving process, so I have been sensitive to that.  There is still some damage being done in his family, but that is a burden I can't bear for them.  Once the dust settles I can counsel them toward forgiveness and reconciliation, but that is about all I can do.  I'm sure I will write more about it in the coming days, because wherever you go through this process there are always lessons learned - both general lessons on dying and specific lessons on the things that are done or undone that could have been handled better.

Meanwhile through, the foggy tendrils of exhaustion are firmly rooted in my brain. So, I will get some sleep, and then when I wake up I think I am going to order a pizza.  My end of the work-week ritual is usually pizza and a movie off TV or the DVR, so as part of getting back to normal, that's my plan tonight, after my nap.  That is assuming that my nap doesn't turn into "to heck with it, I'm going to sleep for sixteen hours straight."  There is about a 50/50 shot of that.

Thoughts on Death

I’ve had cause over the last year or so to think on questions of our mortality, questions of life and death. I don’t have any answers, certainly no magic answers. Pretty much all I have are a lot of questions, a few observations, and the abiding power of my faith. Ultimately such answers are very intimate and may not be relevant to other people at all. But, perhaps, they can serve as a point of inspiration or a moment of reflection or a spark for contemplation, so I thought I would write them down today.

Many of my friends (myself included) are dealing with questions of mortality as they relate to aging parents. My father died 26 years ago and his death remains, for me, one of the defining sources of my experiences with natural death, regardless of how short the span of his life might have been. (He was only a few years older than I am now when he died, meaning he was, relatively, a young man.)

Recently, someone very dear to me experienced that journey, the journey that ends in the death of a beloved parent. My heart is filled with love and concern, with hoped for grace and faith and all those other things that are the brighter side of death, the whole scope of the natural journey that begins with birth and proceeds, inexorably, to the end of this life. That journey and the lives that populated that journey is not my story to tell, so I only mention it in the barest of details.

My prayers, my thoughts, my meditations, my contemplations – they’ve all been turned in that direction. It is a journey we all take, or have taken, in one form or another. Contemplating such things is not a negative in anyway. I would go so far as to say, in general, as a society, we here in America don’t give death it’s due. Too often both the death and the process of dying get shunted aside and removed from view.

We, as a society, are very much a society of life. Death is a feared and ignored specter we prefer to relegate to the horror movie genre, or popcorn films where it is always dramatic. Death is, in itself, a very simple thing – it is a step on an eternal journey. For me, as a matter of faith, death is a great reunion with our true family, with God, with the great Mystery that is. In that manner, it is not something to be dreaded or feared or shunted aside. It is simply a step on this glorious journey of life.

So, for my beloved and for her loss, I would simply like to write down a quote from St. Paul that I always think of when it comes to death and dying and what lies beyond and to express my sincerest and deepest condolences.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but I shall know, even as I am also known.” (1 Corinthians 12)

We dream, we imagine, we hope for and we pray for the Grace of God. For those we loved who have died, they know. It is a small comfort in the night of our grieving, but a vast comfort in the lives in we live.