When they post those lists of things that stress people the most, there’s a couple of events that always make the top ten. Death of a spouse. Moving. Losing your job. I went through all of those in 2010 (OK, I quit my job, but mostly because I was too stressed to work at it any more). Thus, the year just ended was one of the most stressful of my life, and certainly not one I’d want to relive.
During that wretched year, I lost the heart to do many things, including keeping up this blog. Before his diagnosis, it was mostly Isaac who had kept it up, anyway. After the diagnosis (funny how life can get divided into “befores” and “afters”), the Gods know, he was either too ill or too devastated by the side effects of the treatments to write much of anything, much less blog. As for me, daily life became little more than attempts keep it together at work, plus juggle all the medical appointments and the increasingly demanding home care Isaac required. I had no time, energy, or brainpower left for writing.
My cooking blog went by the wayside, too. I had really been enjoying it, to the point where I told Isaac the heck with trying to sell books on magic, I was just gonna write a danged cookbook. As the concept, I had been recording what I cooked for family meals, family usually being just the two of us. I had so much fun. I rarely use recipes; my cooking is pretty much made up on the spot. While I was making dinner, I’d run back and forth between the stove and the computer making notes on what I just threw in the pot. If I liked the result, it was a blog post. (If I didn’t, well, that would be one no one would ever need to know about.) But almost immediately with The Diagnosis, Isaac’s food choices became severely limited. I wasn’t making family dinners any more. It’s not very interesting–or at least it wasn’t to me–to blog about the merits of Boost® over Ensure®. For myself, I grabbed what I could to keep body together. Not much fun to blog about canned soup, sandwiches and rotisserie chickens, either, not to to me anyway. So my cooking blog stopped pretty abruptly.
Isaac died in August. I quit my job in September, then got rid of just about everything I owned (except for books, fifty or so boxes of them). Everything I had left, including the roughly 3000 books, fit in one 14-foot U-Haul truck. I drove to North Carolina and took up temporary digs at my friends’ farm.
That was my 2010. Damned glad that year is over. Out with the old.
And in with the new.
I resolve to make 2011 better. For starters, I’m going to revive this blog.
I’ll post more of my plans in the days to come. You can also find me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter, @PhaedraBonewits.
You’ve been through Chapel Perilous and came out of it sanity intact. Not many can do that.
This was Its own initiation, and you met Its match: naked and vulnerable, in you went anyway, and have come out the wiser amd more powerful for it. You still have difficulties ahead of you, but you are mistress over them, not they over you.
You may be one of the few who could ever go through the Elusinian Mysteries and say, “Oh, I remember that!”