Today I seemed to have woken up grieving everything. There’s my dad, sure, I mean duh. But there’s all this shit it feels like we’ve lost this year. And I almost feel dumb and ignorant saying it, almost feel like the magnitude of what the Black community has been putting up with in this country makes everything else pale in comparison, but I can’t help it, and I’m sorry and I don’t know what to do. This morning I don’t feel like doing anything.

And that’s kind of a problem, because suddenly I have a bunch of clients who are like, let’s get back to normal! Hurray! Aside from the obvious, that come on really, things aren’t normal, there’s my own internal sense, something that seems to have been knocked off its center a bit in my brain. I felt it yesterday when I was a complete idiot on a call with some co-workers because I mixed up a Janet with a Janice—2 totally different clients with different issues. I felt it last night when I was awoken by some police activity literally right outside my bedroom window that was terrifying but ultimately ended peacefully. I was terrified they were going to shoot the man they were arresting. I could hear them cocking their guns. Neighbors were coming out of their houses, I’m sure donning their cell phones, demanding to know what was happening and I was just praying that no one was going to get shot. No one did.

I feel it now because my birthday is coming up and I don’t want it to. It’s not the usual reason, another tick on the slog to 50, it’s that I don’t want to have a birthday. I don’t want to have another milestone, to mark- another thing that has happened since he’s been gone. I was 46 when he died and soon I’ll be 47, then 48 and so on.

I found myself in the shower this morning running through the catalog of the people I have lost in my life. When did I start feeling better after they died? When did I stop grieving? Is there something I did? Is there an action I took that made me feel better? Did I cry more for Grandma than for Grandpa? Did going to, and in some cases, planning a funeral help? I was thinking about when my stepfather, Hank, died in 1997. When he passed away, I had recently moved to New York City after graduating from college and spending some time living in London. He and my mother were living in the Boston suburbs.

His illness and death as always been framed in my mind as a flaw in my character. Ok, maybe not fair, but a flaw of my age and my experience at the time that I honestly did not think he was going to die. The doctors did, and he did, he would joke about it, but I steadfastly refused to accept that. When I came to their apartment the Tuesday before thanksgiving, he was completely bed ridden and was too weak to speak. And still, I didn’t think he was going to die. I spent the next few days running errands including a completely surreal drive to a neighboring town to pick up a huge bottle of morphine at a pharmacy. They just gave it to me.

The night before Thanksgiving was quiet and we sat in dim light by his bed not really saying much. I was tired and decided to go back to the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Hank, though he couldn’t speak, seemed like he didn’t want me to go. The hospice nurse raised her eyebrows at me. I took his hand and said I’ll be back early tomorrow, I’ll see you then. Of course he died before I could see him again and his brother Dave, his son James, my mom and I stood by his bedside with his favorite priest crying. My mom looked at him and said “He has a smile on his face.” And then it started to snow.

Hank died on Thanksgiving and I always tried to focus on that, focus on being grateful for stuff. This was during that period of time when Oprah told us all to have our gratitude journals and man, I fucking tried, I honestly did. But all I could think about was that I never told him how grateful I was for stuff. I sat there by his bed thinking, he’s going to get up any minute. He’s going to be fine. He’s going to Dave’s house and eat turkey with us tomorrow. I was so mad at myself. I went to Atlantic City (because, at the time, it was the cheapest beach getaway I could afford) and yelled at the moon and the ocean for a while. But was it grief for Hank or grief that I was so fucking stupid? Of course he was going to die. Of course. This was my first hospice experience so I hadn’t yet learned the dirty little secret of hospice—you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. And it felt like such a missed opportunity. I mean we weren’t super close, there were things I’m sure I can think of that we found annoying about each other. But when you’re sitting at someone’s death bed you don’t think about that, you say something meaningful, you thank them, and you don’t just expect them to spring out of bed and shout: “Just kidding!”

In the shower this morning when I was running through my grief inventory I was wondering: did that help? Did going to Atlantic City and yelling at the moon and the ocean help? Should I do that now? As long as there is no curfew, should I go yell at the moon or the ocean? Is that why I feel just so stupidly sad today? I haven’t been yelling or screaming, shaking my fist at things and such.

Not so much, I think. Instead I tried to be grateful that I told my dad I was grateful before he died. If it can help in how I felt when Hank died that I never make that mistake again, then it will help. March 4 was my Dad’s 75^th birthday and I created a little book for him with a bunch of old photos and I thanked him for all the things he did for us—all the trips, all the lessons, and for just sticking around. I knew he wouldn’t hear me if I said it so I published it so he could sit with it for a while and know how grateful I was for all the things that he taught me. And that does make me feel better, that he knew that. Marge showed the book to every nurse and every aide that came to sit with him so that they would know also how grateful we were to him. And that does help, it really does. But I’m still sad.

Last night I had another strange dream. I was with my hair dresser and for some reason my older brother, Jason, was there. I was trying to explain that I wanted something fresh, I was getting a little bored with my hair, and can she think of something stylish to do? Then Jason piped up and said “Honestly since you have been her hair dresser I don’t like anything you’ve done for her hair.” This, of course, despite being something my brother would never say, really pissed off my hairdresser.

As you can imagine, she gave me a crappy haircut, really short and choppy. Afterward, I was quite concerned about the blue highlights in my hair. I kept asking her: “Did you cut out all of my highlights? Do we need to refresh them?” and she kept saying: “I don’t know, do you want me to redo them?” and I just kept asking. I just wanted her to tell me what to do. She’s the professional purveyor of blue highlights, she knows more about this topic. Since getting the blue highlights originally in November 2019 I have learned many things about blue highlights but I am by no means an expert. I just wanted her to tell me what to do.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the very fine line between choice and necessity. For example, the last time I took my dog to the vet because she was chewing on her feet non-stop. The vet kept giving us all these choices of what medication to give her. I just wanted to say “I am not a vet! Just freaking tell me what to do!”

Ok, forgive me, I am going to back up a bit. During one of our many visits to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the years toward the end of Eric’s dad Alan’s life, we were present when he was being admitted in to hospice care. If you have never been exposed to hospice care, you should understand that this is indeed the most counter-intuitive experience you will ever have. You start having conversations about “life saving measures” and “do not resuscitate” orders. They have you a big sign to hang on your refrigerator stating that if you are dying, if your breathing has stopped, you do not want to be saved. Hmmm…you do not want to be saved.

You see, hospice isn’t about saving your life, it’s about ending your life. Not in an active way, but in a very passive way. I remember during the meeting with the hospice nurse when Eric’s dad was being admitted, there was this moment where the nurse is asking “Do you understand? Do you agree?” and there was this almost tense moment when I think all of us wanted to shout out “Of course not! What are you fucking nuts?” but that’s the problem again, choice vs. necessity. There is no choice, why are they asking you like it’s a choice? It was a necessity because hospice provided services that Alan desperately needed.

I remember after the nurse left and everyone but me left the room, Alan said to me: “it’s not fun talking about your death.” And I paused for a second, I wanted so desperately to come up some sort of Maya Angelou level of profound wisdom or comfort in that moment. All I could say was: “I don’t suppose it is.”

Let’s fast forward a bit. Eric and I drove to Aurora, Colorado very soon after hearing my Dad had been admitted into hospice care. We both understood what this meant, and the urgency was palpable. When we arrive, my Dad was actually standing, he was able to, with the help of a walker, get out of bed and move to the commode next to the bed, sit, do his biz, and then move back to the bed.

They had put a hospital bed in the living room and he was constantly fiddling with it, he seemed to be seeking the sweet spot between head elevation, foot elevation and pillow placement. Eric, me and my stepmother Marge sat by his bed and tried to help him in his quest for comfort. One of the “problems” was that he wasn’t in pain so we weren’t sure when to give him the morphine they had left for us. They said it would also help his breathing, but he seemed to be breathing ok.

It was two days of up bed, down bed, fiddle with the pillows. The nurse came Tuesday morning and said that he was having trouble breathing, we didn’t believe her. She asked where the oxygen was and we said he didn’t want it so we didn’t order it. She said to take the bed control away from him and we said no, that was the only control he had left. She said give him the morphine and we reluctantly agreed and gave him the lowest dose and he spent most of the rest of the day asleep.

That made us feel bad, we felt like we had doped him and so he wasn’t able to really stand up anymore. He tried to get out of bed and me, Eric, my step-mother Marge and my Dad almost ended up on the floor. Marge said she wanted him back. She wanted him to be able to get up again, to go to the bathroom, to sit on the edge of the bed rubbing his back while she talked about their sailing adventures.

We all had a terrible night and I woke up with a certain amount of dread and clarity. They needed to take away our choice. We were making the wrong choices because we loved him and didn’t want to lose him and it’s no fun to talk about your own death. They needed to tell us what to do, they needed to take away our choices because we were making them for the wrong reasons.

I called the nurse, used the word “road map” and she returned. The oxygen came and we agreed on a schedule for the morphine and the anti-anxiety drugs. She explained to us, whether it was true or not, that him being asleep all the time now, essentially in a coma, was more about the progression of the disease than the drugs. That was what we were witnessing was him comfortable and up down of the bed was him in discomfort.

And so he slipped away from us 36 hours or so later. He was comfortable, he was peaceful. As the aide who was sitting with him said at 1:30 in the morning: “There’s no more breathing.”

It’s no fun to talk about your own death, or the death of someone you love. It’s really no fun to have to let go of any power you ever thought you had over life. It’s hard to understand that you need to surrender to the inevitable because it’s inevitable whether it’s good or bad, and you can do is try and make it as good as you can. I guess that’s the only power we have: “as good as you can.” That’s love, right? As good as you can.

Home again. Back to normal. Who knew “normal” would be the world burning down? All of our restlessness of the past 3 months has collided with all our anger from the past 50 years. I hear sirens as I sit here.

It’s strange when you lose someone that you start to think that when things happen, when the world changes again and again and again, they won’t know this thing happened. Their world froze in time the second the breathing stopped and yet here I sit listening to sirens and deleting advertising emails from my inbox for the best Father’s Day gifts.

There are no more fathers in our lives. No more step-fathers or grandfathers or fathers-in-law or father fathers. No one to buy a tie for anymore. It hits me at times like that, times like when I’m standing in my bedroom that has been the same for 15 years except for that “Ask Dr. Science” mug on the dresser that wouldn’t be there if he were still alive.

After my grandmother passed in august of 2018, I remember going through her house, looking for mementos that I may want to keep before the estate sale. It reminded me of the old version of Wheel of Fortune when you got to go shopping after you solved the puzzle, before they realized that cash was a better prize than an overpriced washing machine. I had that feeling again walking through my dad’s house. All I really ended up with was the “Ask Dr. Science” mug. I can’t remember when I bought that for him, probably a father’s day present. I do remember being quite proud of myself because the back of the mug said: “I know more than you do!”

That motto embodied my dad. Not only did he think he knew more than you do he probably did. But the other thing that embodied my dad was that he would teach it to you if you wanted. My dad had several acts in his life: high school science teacher, sailor, camper, photographer, guitar player, banjo player, ukulele player, hot air balloon enthusiast. But the one thread that he carried in to every act was he was a teacher. Never before since perhaps my husband Eric did an avocation so perfectly line up with a vocation.

So here I am, home again, where everything is so familiar yet so completely changed. Grief sucks.

Here’s the next quote I used to say a lot which now has new meaning: “Man makes plans, God laughs.”

I’m sitting on a deck in a backyard in Aurora, Colorado listening to my stepmother’s wind-chimes and the wind rustling through the trees. All the irises and columbine flowers have bloomed as well as the tree they call the “bee tree” for what I’m learning are obvious reasons. There is a lot of suburban wildlife in the backyard of this house my Dad and stepmother moved into during my junior year of college. I won’t tell you when that was but let’s just say the year didn’t start with a 2. There are squirrels and magpies, bunnies and blue jays. Yesterday I saw a momma fox and her 2 little kits running around in the neighbor’s front yard. I had seen them a couple of days ago on the very deck where I sit now.

This blows my mind a little because I grew up in Aurora, not in this house, but not far from this house, and I never saw a fox or a fox kit in our backyard. Granted it could be attributed to the suburban wildlife feeding station my dad and stepmom set up at this house with peanuts and thistle and seed. Finches like thistle, apparently, and I’ve seen a goldfinch, a strawberry finch and some sort of grey finch that doesn’t seem to have its own sexy name. It is oddly peaceful, considering all the madness that seems to me lurking out there at the stage door, just waiting for someone to crack the door so it can rush in.

My dad was a high school biology teacher when I was a kid and there were always snakes and hamsters and other critters around. Every outing was an adventure of what sort of creepy crawlers were trying to scurry away from us. More than one time we would find an injured snake and we would catch it and nurse it back to health to be released into a field away from our house. We would catch tadpoles in puddles and raise them to be little frogs. If my hamster died, it was time to do an autopsy that even Quincy would admire.

After they moved into this house, my dad created a camera set up that was like a hunting blind- a tripod and curtain to hid him and provide good light, a chair. He would sit there and stare out of his camera lens and wait for something to scurry into frame so he could take a picture. Eric used to tease him and call him Terry Mieger- the world’s laziest nature photographer.

Joking aside, he did also venture out into nature beyond the backyard- reservoirs, mountains, zoos. The first time he went to Florida he probably took 2,000 pictures of birds and flowers and alligators. One year, when visiting us in LA, he almost had a stroke when he discovered there were turtles in the pond in front of the famous Hobbit House in Culver City. I had taken him there to see the unusual architecture and tell the interesting “only in LA story” about the house. But all he saw were those fucking turtles. Dad had many chapters in his life and his last was an actual nature photographer. He taught classes in it, because of course he did, and belonged to clubs. Every year he would create a calendar with 12 of his favorite photos from the year and send it out to everyone he could think of.

Being here in Colorado this week has made me think a lot about states—the United States in which we live, that is. More specifically how, why in the fuck, when it comes to matters of life and death, should there be differences in how things are handled, from state to state. Shouldn’t it be, when it comes to the most essential thing about yourself—your life, your breath, your health—that the only state we truly live in is the state of being a human being.

Before I came here, I thought a lot about this in relation to this COVID crisis we are in. Why can I get a free test in Los Angeles without even symptoms, while other areas refuse to even acknowledge there is a problem? Why am I required to cover my face while other states are not? Not even other states, but other cities, other counties that I can literally WALK to. Why can’t we have one unified response to the problem so that we just get it over with? I’m asking these hypothetically because I know there are answers and no solutions but I don’t want to dwell on it too much.

Now that I’m here I’ve been thinking about this in relation to healthcare. Two weeks ago my dad was placed in hospice care. He had been diagnosed with cancer a little over a year ago and after a year of ineffective treatments, among other things, we have come to this. Isn’t it strange how these things always happen faster than you think they will?

I wish I could say that this is my first experience with home hospice care. It is my 4^th in 3 different states. This is my 2^nd experience with the Denver hospice. And I found myself wondering why in Massachusetts my stepfather had a hospice nurse with him almost 24 hours a day yet here we have to pay for a nighttime health aide and we’ve seen the nurse twice. Why in New Mexico did we feel so supported, from the nurse to the bath aide to the chaplain, they provided everything we needed and were with us whenever we raised a hand, yet here we’re not even sure how much medication to give and when. My stepmom hasn’t even met the hospice doctor.

And again I start to think, shouldn’t this be the same for all? Shouldn’t all of us have the right to die in the same level of comfort no matter our zip code? Shouldn’t the family members of the dying receive the same level of information, or support, or guidance no matter where? And yes I’m being naïve but so fucking what. We should want these things. And I know it’s not worse right now because of the pandemic because my other experience in Denver was during normal times. The only difference now is we’re talking through masks.

There you have it—COVID and my dad’s death, two of my top reasons for hating 2020. Two reasons to remind me about how far away we are from what is important. Two reasons for me to wonder why we have to be so far away.

Dad died early on May 21. We finally figured out the meds and he was finally peaceful. He taught us a lesson until the end, that you don’t change who you are just because you can’t walk and you can’t talk. He could still roll his eyes, he could still give me that look when he knew what I was saying was bullshit. I’ll never forget that.

Before I go, I have to add that I just glanced over and saw a black cat running away from the deck toward the side of the house. Beside the obvious question of how many holes do they have in their stupid fence, I would also like to add, “what the fuck?” It’s official, I’m truly doomed. God’s laughing, I suppose.

I used to have this running joke with people:

People: “How are you?”

Me: “Could be worse.” (everyone laughs) “Or maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate”

I’ve been thinking lately, is it me? Did I indeed tempt fate? Is it my fault that we are now in the midst of a global pandemic (depending on who you ask)? I’m going to say no, but you know, I’m white, middle aged and sort of liberal so I like to think I have that kind of power.

Dispatches from May 2020: Things are sort opening again and no one really feels great about that. I mean, mostly no one. I will caveat this by saying that I work in HR and my husband, Eric, works in live theatre. Things have been fun around the Sims household lately. In my industry, we have had quite a roller coaster, and lately we’re dealing with  the questions about reopening. Here is a recent typical conversation with one of my clients:

Client: “Can you advise how we can safely go back to work?”

Me: “Work from home.”

Client: “But everyone wants to come back to the office.”

Me: “Why?”

I mean, cause I hate to break it to them, but all the reasons they want to come back to the office are about to go away. Remember your awesome “pets in the workplace” policy? Gone. Free snacks in the breakroom? Gone. Breakroom gone too. Frosted Flakes dispenser near the foosball table? Gone- both the Frosted Flakes and the foosball. Weekly happy hour with a free Uber ride home? Yep, you guessed it.

So really, why are we so hot to get back in the office? I mean unless you have a cat or a 2 year old isn’t it not only safer—but better to stay home? Maybe I’m projecting. I mean, honestly, I’m an HR Consultant, so I get paid whether you screw up the return to work or not- and if you do screw it up, I get paid more! So everyone wins! Or at least I do and the lawyers do, but as long as Trump doesn’t, we’re all good, literally.

I don’t want to get too intellectually political, only personally political. I’m not going to pretend I’m right or that I know a whole lot of the details which constitute the debacle of American society right now. If you want that, listen to the “You’re Wrong About” podcast. I have fastidiously avoided listening to, reading, or even acknowledging as English anything Trump has said for the past 35 years, but in particular the past 4. So, in fact checking, I may be wrong about some things. However, I am going to admit, and liberal friends don’t hate me because you guys could use to start forgiving people a little, when Trump was elected, I had this thought that he was such a buffoon that he was basically incapable of really accomplishing anything as president. I literally said to myself, “How bad can it be?” Thanks Fate for the answer being: “Worse than Vietnam.”

Quick, Oliver Stone, make a movie about COVID-19 before the election so we can all start feeling guilty enough and change our minds.

Nutshell time, lots and lots of people are dying or getting sick and lots and lots of people either don’t care or don’t believe it. I care, and I believe it, and I’ve been working from home for 5 years so what do I know about it?