Three Chaotic Months

Readers, I feel bad.

You haven't heard from me in 3 months, and this is why: so much has happened, and I've felt so many feelings, that I never had the energy to write about them. Allow me to summarize.

July
I got married on July 13, 2019. To which I say: yay! It was an amazing wedding, I have an incredible husband, and I'm so happy we got to celebrate with everyone.

Two days before the wedding, however, a few things happened. For example, there was a massive rainstorm that shut down our nearby airports, and the bridesmaid ended up in Richmond, VA when she'd been aiming for Newark, NJ.

Pictured: a small problem.

Also, my 91-year-old grandmother got too sick to travel. She had been counting down to the big day. We'd hired a nurse to make the 5-hour road trip with her, and arranged for hospice nurses to be on-call at the hotel. She was even packed for the journey! But then, she got an infection and couldn't get out of bed.

We ended up having her niece drive to the nursing home and FaceTime my sister's phone just to let her see my dress.

Pictured: A family group photo. Not pictured: the trouper of a photographer, or the cousin who made this happen.

Anyway, we rallied and made the day a big success. It truly was great! 

Afterwards, Bryan and I packed up and hit the road for British Columbia, Canada, where we spent 2 weeks honeymooning. (On which, more to come.) It was marred only by one small incident that happened on the second-to-last day, namely: I got laid off from my job via email at 8 PM on a Friday night.

😠

Mind you, I was supposed to return to work that Monday. I only got 60 hours' notice that I was out of a job!

The next day, we flew home, landing a mere 17 hours before I auditioned for the game show Jeopardy! (I had applied for an audition months earlier, and that was the only day they could fit me in.) My mom met us at the airport to announce that my grandmother had gotten worse, which brings us to...

August

Newly unemployed and fresh out of my audition, I packed a bag and got on a train to Maryland to see my grandmother. On the way there, I suddenly started getting dizzy spells, which lasted for almost a week and are still the subject of some debate among my doctors. ("Anxiety attacks" and "salt deficiency" are currently neck-in-neck as possible explanations.) 

At any rate, I arrived in time to learn that Grandmother was feeling much better. So we made that a nice social visit, instead of a deathbed visit. At one point, I took her to get her hair done, and she played catch with her hairdresser's grandson.

Back to NJ I went, and I started the job-hunt hustle. On the second Tuesday of the month, I got offered two jobs within the span of 3 hours.

😌

....but each one was a part-time adjunct professor position. Did I mention that one of them is in Brooklyn, NY, and one of them is in Paterson, NJ?

Needs must, so I accepted both, and took on the task of figuring out a sane way to make the commute. (No luck so far, but stay tuned...) The first one started on August 27, so I had just 14 days to get through employee orientation at both places and plan out syllabi for each. I scrambled and pulled it all together in time.

When I got out of my very first class, I had a text from my sister: "call me." Grandmother, it turns out, was dying. I had no choice but to cancel on my second day of work and rush to her bedside.

This was taken just 3.5 weeks after the previous picture.

I arrived in time to spend 1 day with her before she lost consciousness. Then for 3 days, we sat vigil. 

And let me tell you, nothing can prepare a person for a death vigil. The awful waiting game just doesn't make it into most movies, or funeral homilies. We like to say, "she went peacefully surrounded by friends and family," rather than, "after she stopped being able to swallow, her friends and family tried to keep her lips comfortably moist while she slowly dehydrated." 

Death vigils are heartbreaking and heartwarming and tear-jerking and amusing, all at once. Hours go by in a blur of nurses and visitors coming and going while vital signs get worse. One chaplain suggested we sing to her, since the sense of hearing is one of the last ones to go. There were many, many renditions of "Amazing Grace" sung over Labor Day weekend - Bryan on guitar, the rest of us on vocals.

September

The death process went on for so long, that I actually had to leave and get back in time for work on Tuesday. It broke my heart, but Grandmother never missed a gig in her life, so we decided to do it that way. Grandmother breathed her last on Monday, September 2. I worked Tuesday-Thursday, and took a red-eye train to the wake straight from my last evening class on Thursday.

Grandmother had requested that I handle the music for the funeral, so I pulled myself together and made that happen. Bryan learned 4 Methodist hymns on the guitar, and I cantored for the congregation. It was a funeral packed full of family and friends - truly a beautiful event - but of course, I couldn't exactly enjoy any of it. 

Grief is weird. Everyone experiences it, without exception, and yet it is absolutely unique every time. It can last for days or lifetimes. You might feel broken, energized, distraught, relieved, angry, depressed, peaceful, or lost. In fact, you'll probably feel all of those things, but in no particular order, and with plenty of breaks where you start to feel normal - only to suddenly be reminded of your loss by something random, and crash into pieces again. 

Perhaps the weirdest feeling is getting condolences from your coworkers, when you return to work less than 48 hours after the funeral. It's as if the world says, to grieving people, "You probably feel totally hopeless right now...so...you'll be all better at 9 AM tomorrow, right?" A particularly strange twist on this, for me, was the fact that Grandmother left me a small cemetery*, so I had to start thinking about work during the actual wake.

*More to come about the cemetery, very soon.

In short, I have been grieving, but I didn't get a whole lot of time to dwell on grief alone. Because 10 days later, I got a call from a Jeopardy! producer, offering me a slot on the show!

The next day after that, two things happened:

1. En route from Paterson to Brooklyn, I blew a tire.
2. Bryan cut his finger making dinner while I was in Brooklyn, and ended up needing to Uber to an urgent care.

The combined fallout was messy, both emotionally and financially, and when the dust cleared we had new rims and no sensation in part of Bryan's left index finger.

October

Onward we stumble, and life is still chaotic. There has been good news (an invitation to present at the international TESOL conference next year!) and bad news (the new tires are kinda bad!). My therapist keeps congratulating me on how well I'm coping. 

"Just remember how worried you were when you had to take two jobs!" she said recently, "Now look, you've been working both while also going through a litany of crises, any single one of which could send a person into therapy!" And soon, I'll be upping sticks for LA to film an appearance on a national game show.

I hope they serve alcohol on the plane.