a post about death, or: happy friday, everyone

I feel like I’m slowly emerging from my psycho funk (I’m pretty sure that’s the official DSM term for it) only to discover the world outside my fire-damaged brain is also on fire. Republicans are trying their hardest to make Obama cry. They’re taking things away from people who barely had anything to start with and convincing some of those people (I’m talking to you, Joe and Jane Tea Party) that taxes—on their nonexistent incomes—have been keeping them down. That, and the queers, feminists and immigrants, of course. America is a few years away from being a second world country. England, despite its free education and socialized health care, is still full of Angry Young Men.

T-Mec is dying. It took longer than anyone predicted, another notch in the mystery that is medical science. She still has good days. She still likes to eat and purr and insinuate herself into the nearest lap. But her leg is swollen, her lumps are big and oozy and she often looks tired and glassy-eyed. It’s not time yet, but it will be soon.

Rachel, AK’s good friend and my more recent but very much admired friend, is dying. She was diagnosed with stomach cancer just days after we lost the Squeakies, and it’s been a long-short four months. It’s not time yet, but it will be in days. Her husband Jeff’s updates (which have only recently supplanted Rachel’s own) are heartbreaking. The kind of stuff that makes you cry at your desk, feel the bright terrible clarity of love and loss, feel more awake and connected than you did when you sat down, then realize the price of that little zap of connectedness.

My aunt is sick; probably something she’ll bounce back from very soon, but it’s taken frustrating twists and turns, and the unknown-ness hovers like a raincloud.

It’s hard to come back to the world of carrying about others when there are so many reminders that they could be whisked away from you. Or you could be whisked away from them. One image that has comforted me a little bit in the past few months is that of my mom, in Heaven—total fluffy cloud land, with unlimited Oreos and lots of good books—holding one Squeaky in each hand. Two little balls of light, the grandkids she never knew but knows now, the kids I’ll never know.

Rachel had a miscarriage before her oldest daughter was born, and it occurred to me today that she’ll know that baby now. That’s something, right? And of course I don’t know what the afterlife is. It’s probably something much more amorphous than my fluffy cloud land with its anthropomorphic spirits. But like I’ve said before, the picturing it and the wanting it is the thing itself. Love. God. Whatev.

And T-Mec, whose name was Angel when B and I first adopted her (but who’s a little too fond of swatting OC and ripping armchairs to shreds to earn that title on Earth), will make some introductions up there. I have a lot of people (including cat-people) on the other side now. Someday I hope it makes me less afraid of going there.