Hi Darling Ones,

I’m being held hostage by avocados and grief.

My plan for today was to work a bunch (still behind due to dad death), make chicken fajita rice burritos for dinner, and then tuck in with The Go-Go’s documentary while I still have my free trial of Showtime.

However, the 48¢ avocados I bought on Thursday have other plans. Namely, the “we’re gonna wait to ripen until a more inconvenient time so enjoy your leftover soup, bitch” plans.

Rude avocados. Don’t they know my dad just died?

I really wish I could be done grieving now. It’s really boring. Nobody cares anymore.* Most of all, I really miss my cognitive function.

Sometimes I forget what I’m saying while I’m in the middle of saying it. The right words elude me. My memory is wonky as fuck.

Last night BFK and I did CSA** for the first time in a month. I was trying to recite “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I’ve had this poem tucked into the ol’ brain wrinkles forever. Like maybe since I discovered Robert Frost after reading The Outsiders when I was eleven.

But last night all I could conjure up was My little horse must think it queer/To stop without a farmhouse near.

It was frustrating. I could still pull out “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” And just to prove I have a good memory I rapped a little Bel Biv DeVoe:
The time was six o’clock on the Swatch watch
No time to chill, got a date, can’t be late
Hey, the girl is gonna do me
Move to the Jacuzzi, ooh, that booty
Smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no

Only for some reason I thought this was from “Poison” even though “Do Me” is right there in the lyrics.

Yes, when you are my friend I will randomly spout bits of poetry. I’m fun. I will also send you home with a quart of delicious, homemade split pea soup and three tiny boxes of Dots candy (my favorite).

My brain is so fucked right now and I hate it.

Part of me is worried this is a bigger problem that cannot be explained away by grief. Another part of me is all, your dad just died!

I thought maybe the effects of grief would wear off after three weeks.

Oh hey, I figured out how I’m doing. I feel bad. All the time. About everything. I feel bad that I’m still grieving. I feel bad that my work is suffering. I feel bad that I can’t think straight. I feel bad that the only thing I can seem to write or talk about is being sad. I feel bad that I’m boring everyone.

I want to tell everyone to go away and that if they leave me alone I’ll probably get better on my own. I also still want all of the attention. All of it.

Sorry,
Jodi

P.S. In a lucky coincidence The Office LEGO kit I pre-ordered this summer arrived last week. It’s excellent on so many levels. I’ve been slowly putting it together this week after work. It keeps my hands and brain busy, which then distracts me from feeling so rotten. While I feel really bad about everything right now, I do feel good at how good I am at keeping myself distracted from my emotions. Go me!

P.P.S Yesterday I got a giant jug of pure Vermont maple syrup from a friend who said he wanted me to have better syrup. This comes after I horrified him by professing my undying love for Log Cabin Syrup. It was a kind, thoughtful gift and it makes my heart feel a little sunnier.

 
* This comes off whinier & shittier than I intend. I don’t expect anyone to care about my grief anymore. Like I said, it’s super boring. I still don’t know “how I’m doing.” Mostly I am weird, sad, bitter, resentful, and tired.

I’m a big believer in “nobody cares/thinks about you as much as you think they do.” That’s not a bad thing. Humans are self-centered. We think about ourselves the most. This means that nobody but you is thinking about that one stupid thing you did/said/wore that one time. I’m much too busy thinking about that stupid thing I said/did/wore.

 
**CSA is when BFK and I gather (usually) once a week to debrief and eat garbage fast food (though I have cooked on and off throughout the years). It started because we joined a CSA that delivered to her work. She would drop off my portion on her way home and socialize. A tradition was born.

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Dear Darling Ones,

I was supposed to go back to work today. I really need to go back to work. I have at least three projects now overdue and one more soon to be overdue. If I do not work I do not get paid.

Unfortunately, the dad’s death did not turn me into an obscenely rich heiress. My inheritance was 157 wheat pennies and an old, inoperable Kodamatic instant camera (more on this at a later date).

And yet, guess what? I cannot bring myself to do work. I decided my new job is watching the Frightened Rabbit’s cover of “The Whole of the Moon” on repeat while intermittently crying. Someone should pay me for this. I’m really good at it.

Today I had a lovely exchange with one of my clients who told me her husband was stoked to see the Johnny Cash stamp on the thank you card I sent. I was stoked he noticed my cool-ass stamps because I bet nobody else did.

She asked me how I was doing. I told her I was a numb zombie, and she reassured me that was normal. Her kindness is much appreciated and she never once asked me if I was doing the work that is overdue.

All the kindness I’ve been afforded makes me super weepy. I’m not sure if it’s my brain’s super sneaky way to delay dealing with grief, or if unending gratitude is part of the process.

For the record, what does it even mean to deal with grief? Does it just mean being sad every day until you are not sad? Am I supposed to sit and contemplate all the ways in which I am sad and then be like, okay grief has been properly dealt with?

I googled it and the answers were not much help. From what I gather it is just being sad until you are not sad anymore. Too bad for grief, because I’m always a little bit sad and have been since birth.

So, anyway, I was supposed to start real life today now that my house is empty of family and their dogs.

It started off rocky when I didn’t wake up until 10:15, but I managed to exercise and eat a healthy, non-donut breakfast. Since then I have failed miserably at real life-ing.

There are good intentions somewhere in my zombie brain. I don’t think zombie’s have brains. I kind of hate zombies and that whole trend with the pub crawls and the Walking Dead and all that sucked ass. I do know zombies want to eat brains and thus ends my knowledge go zombies. Maybe they want to eat them because they don’t have them?

I digress.

I tried. I pulled Angrboda onto my lap and opened an email, but then I looked out the window to watch the wind in the leaves and the shadows they made on the side of my house and then next thing I knew it was two hours later.

Basically it took me two hours to read one email.

I’m also failing at being gentle with myself because I keep chastising me for being a lazy piece of shit and using my dad’s death to avoid work and really I should just get to work because of the aforementioned need to get paid. Plus, I’m worried my clients are going to get mad at me for not completing my work in a timely fashion after my dad died and then I will lose them all and end up homeless.

And yet, as soon as I click publish on this I’m going right back to watching the video.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

If you’re an avid consumer of any kind of media — books, tv, movies — you’re familiar with this trope. It’s the one where you learn of someone’s death and you do not cry.

For my entire life as a well-known and copious cryer I thought this was some writerly bullshit. Kind of like letting go of a breath you didn’t even know you were holding in or doing anything with ever fiber of your being.

Then my dad died, and I discovered this is an actual thing.

Sister #4 knocked at my door at 12:45 last Friday morning roughly an hour after we went to bed. I was still awake, though I had taken my glasses off and put my phone down in preparation for sleep.

“Jodi,” she said from the other side of my door, left ajar for Wendell. “Mom thinks dad passed.”
She started to open the door more.
“You don’t want to come in here,” I said. I sleep naked and the last thing we needed was that whole situation. “Let me get dressed.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you coming with? Do you want me to wait?”
“Oh,” I said, sitting on the end of my bed pulling clothes out of my dresser. “No. Text me when you get there.”

I did not cry. Instead, I took a shower. I took a shower so fast I was in and out and back on the edge of the bed before my sister got to my parents’ apartment, three miles away.

I did not cry when she came home at 3 a.m. after the cremation place picked up my dad’s body.

I cried a little when Sister #2 and Ben arrived Friday morning.

I shed a few tears when Jodi Hanson came over Sunday afternoon. Mostly, though I was choking out the words to tell her how sorry I was and how much her mom’s kindness meant to me.

Now that I think about it, I cried quite a bit when the Strib published his obit online Saturday afternoon.

But it was Sunday night when Sister #4 played a voicemail from my dad wishing her a happy birthday that I lost it. It was like Dawson Leery did when he heard Mitch’s voice on the answering machine. It wasn’t exactly like that. I didn’t rip my sister’s phone from her hand and smash it or anything. I just sobbed. Hard.

When I was done, I looked at my family and said, “Boy, that hit me.”
“Well,” Sister #2 said. “Your dad did just die.”

Today I am intermittently weepy over everything and nothing. Pretty sure every fiber of my being is exhausted on a level I’ve never experienced before.

Sister #4 goes home tomorrow morning and then it’s just me, Wendell, and the grief.

I hate that the only way to deal with this is to go through it. I hate that I have to start work again on Monday like my dad didn’t just die. I hate that I’m unable to sleep my way through the mourning, which is what I usually do. I slept for like a week after my Uncle John died.

I hate everything, but you, Darling Ones.

Thanks for being here,
Jodi

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Well, Darling Ones,

My dad died so early on Friday, September 16th it still felt like Thursday night.

He died after Sister #4 got here from South Dakota but before Sister #2 arrived from Oregon.

Before he died, my dad agreed to see us, finally giving up the grudge he had been holding onto since June. So, Sister #4 got to say goodbye and make peace with him. We are happy she had that opportunity since she was the one who really needed it. I opted not go see him on his deathbed and when Sister #4 came home she said it was good I didn’t go.

My mom said he died peacefully and that’s the best you can hope for, right?

I am not in the head space to write about this linearly, to weave a cohesive narrative about the days following the death of my dad.

My dad just died! How can I write something good? That is an excuse and exclamation we lobbed at each other all week.

“Jaycie, will you get my some water? My dad just died.”

Anytime someone said something that didn’t quite make sense, something roastable, or forgot what they were doing they shouted, My dad/grandpa/husband/father-in-law just died.

My family’s love language is teasing in a manner that is never meant to be hurtful (though sometimes that happens), only hilarious. So whenever you got roasted you just shouted MY DAD JUST DIED!

It started in the wee small hours after Dad died, we’re talking like 4 a.m., Sister #4 asked me how we would get Dad’s ashes. I said they’d mail them.

She was all, “What?! Like two-day free shipping?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They mail ashes all the time.”
“Really?” She asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My dad just died!”
“So did mine!”

And thus a family meme was started. Is that a meme? I’m too lazy to look it up.

I have a file in my google drive called “Dad’s Obit” and that’s something I never thought of even as I contemplated his death.

Also, if you really want to get me heated up in a non-sexual way ask me what I think about the gross way capitalism has commodified death and how expensive newspaper obituaries are.

We joked about how I’m so cheap I just wanted it to say, “Dad=Dead.” We shouted “Dad’s dead” a lot too, constantly doing the Aunt Jackie bit from the “Roseanne” episode where their dad died.

I had more things I wanted to get down in pixels, but I have since forgotten them. My dad did just die, after all.

Please do not ask me how I am doing, because I am not doing. At all. Mostly, I am crushing candy and blitzing emojis on my phone while singing “Girl Inform Me” on repeat in my head. I have no idea why my brain chose that song.

I am not sure how I am doing. From what I can tell I am numb and sad and overwhelmed and exhausted both physically & mentally.

I really wanted everyone to get the hell out of my house right up until Sister #2, Ben, and Jaycie left yesterday. Now, I’m going through that with Sister #4. I want her to go home but am also freaking out that she’s leaving Sunday.

For the most part that’s an accurate description of how I’m doing: two diametrically opposed things at the same time. I want everyone to leave but I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want anyone to ask how I am but I want everyone to acknowledge that my dad just died and I’m grieving. I want to get back to “real life” but I don’t want to work because I am mourning.

I have so many things I want to write but I’m too tired to really think clearly.

My dad just died & it sucks.

Jodi

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Well, Darling Ones,

It seems I’m going to blog my way through this time as my dad lays dying. I really need to document my existence right now and I do not have the mental or emotional capacity to examine the reasons at the moment.

Jodi Ann Chromey, you might be thinking, why are you not spending every remaining moment you have left with your dad?

I can’t and I won’t, that’s why. Stop being so judgey.

I can’t because my dad is not currently speaking to the remaining members of the Sister Club. He stopped talking to us around Father’s Day because he blames us for Sister #3’s estrangement.

We had a long discussion about it when Sisters #2 & #4 were here in early June. He did not like how that conversation went.

So it goes. I’m okay with that being the last time I saw or spoke to him. He left on good terms, only growing angry a few days later as he processed everything. I can rest easy knowing the last thing I said to him was, “I love you. Have a good night.”

I won’t see him because I do not deal well with witnessing the end of life. It upsets me to the point where I cannot hide how sad and freaked out I am, which makes the other people in the room try to comfort me. It’s a bad situation. They have better things do in that moment than tend to a crybaby. And it’s wasted effort because there is no comfort in those moments.

I know this because I accidentally ended up in the room when my Grammu took her last breath. It sucked. Do not want to do that again.

This is why I have so much time to work, blog, and fixate on the brain weasels.

Brain weasels are whatever stupid, inconsequential thing my brain decides I must do lest I be a complete failure of a human.

Before I get to today’s brain weasels, I need to say a few things about weasels in general.

1. In college we used the term Greasy Weasel to label dudes who were kinda shifty. That guy who mansplained Pearl Jam and their lack of longevity to me in 1994? Greasy Weasel. Kevin, that short cross country dude who went on to become a cop? Total Greasy Weasel.
2. Despite this whenever I hear the term weasel without the greasy adjective I think of Pauly Shore. I spent a lot of the early-90s loving The Weas. So much so I saw “Encino Man” in the theaters.
3. I’ve been singing The Weasel Song from Bob’s Burgers all day.

Anyway, today’s brain weasel is making a bunch of food and freezing it so we don’t starve once my dad dies. The Midwestern Old Lady in me is strong. It’s taking all my self-control not to pop a tater-tot hotdish into the oven. I am going to allow myself to make chicken stock this weekend and probably a Cuban pork roast. I have about seventeen pound of pork shoulder in my freezer right now. I won’t explain why because it’s stupid.

Your not-so-greasy (I showered today) weasel,
Jodi

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