It Gets Better

 

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Still Muddling Through Somehow

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At the park, I walked my dog through the rain this morning— not really proper rain— more like air that has decided to shrug water at you out of habit. It suited my mood well enough. As I walked, my thoughts kept returning to the same small universe they often do. They are not new thoughts. They orbit the same losses. They consider the same betrayals, the same questions that never resolve. They have been captured, these thoughts, never to escape, never to be forgotten, never to burn up in the atmosphere. It is simply the gravitational field of my life now. What might seem or feel like self-pity is more like muscle memory, which tells me I need more exercise. The holidays are here, and Christmas has always been central to my life, atheist that I am. It was stitched into Jenny’s life — the love of Christmas — at least as strongly as it was stitched into mine. We carried that love forward with the kids, year after year, without ever needing to talk about why it mattered; it just did. I...
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Three Days

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Three days was the morning My focus three days old My head, it landed To the sounds of cricket bows 3 Days Gone I really couldn't have hoped for a better Christmas holiday, with both girls and I celebrating multiple times. We went to the Central Cinema twice--once for the Muppet Christmas Carol which, bluntly put, is sacrilege to the memory of all I hold holy around the bourgeois Dickens story. I own the Reginald Owen, Alistar Sims, George C. Scott, a couple of cartoon versions, but not the Mr. Magoo version (it must exist, right?). All have one Marley. None have Rizzo the Rat accompanying a Gonzo as Dickens to provide exposition. Call me a purist. I own a very old copy of the story itself--not quite a novel in length-that I bought when my mother was dying in hospital back in 2008. I have never gotten through the first stave, praise the lord of ADHD.  Anyhow, Christmas has been an utter delight. We dutifully watched Charlie Brown's Christmas, played board games together--a firs...
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Life, A Cascading Series of Disappointment

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Jenny has cancer.  Terminal cancer.  We learned that in late July. Jenny had  dropped 25 lbs. in the spring without trying.  She had been having vague stomach complaints since October.  As a balm for her concerns, her doctor agreed to do a CT scan for her, but told her they would find nothing.  Jenny wanted to rule out pancreatic cancer, which had recently killed her dad-in the spring of 2019.  Her mother had been sick with lymphoma since February 2020.  The day of the scan, the doctor told Jenny they would get results back in a few days. When Jenny's phone rang that same afternoon, I was in the living room with Abby, where I was torturing her by playing the Rapping Duke on Youtube. Jenny shouted from the room, "Geoff, get in here, the doctor's on the phone." "You have a four cm. mass on your pancreas,"  he said. Jenny made a sound like someone had punched her in the stomach.  "There is a spot on your liver. You have a necrotic lymph nod...
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