Losing It

The other day, someone was recounting a story to me about a woman who “Woke up one day and told her husband she was leaving to go and live among the primates in Africa”. Leaving behind two, not fully raised children and a spouse to try and hold together the pieces. She just completely lost it. And of course there are other stories like this…

Man comes home from work one day, tosses some clothes in a garbage bag, says “I’m done” and leaves the family forever.

Pastor has an affair with his church secretary and leaves his wife with four small children.

Anyway, you get the idea. We all have and know these stories. They are abundant.

Over the years, I’ve found myself thinking “When do I get to lose it?” How is that just an option for some people? Why does somebody get to be the unstable one? Who chooses?? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, I get it. Mental health stuff is real. Sometimes people just have a breakdown. Fine. But shit, man. Somebody has to stick around and make sure the kids get to swimming lessons. Somebody has to pay the fucking mortgage and clean up the dog shit and buy mom a birthday gift. Somebody needs to make sure the FAFSA forms are filled out for the college bound kid and somebody needs to deal with it when the other kid misses so much school that they might not graduate. And if your life is unraveling at a brisk pace, but your sister is hospitalized or your dad dies? Well. You better just put your shit aside and write a eulogy. You will take your shift at the hospital. You will definitely host a giant client event a week after your dad’s funeral because there wasn’t time to cancel or reschedule without huge consequences, not the least of which is that you need to keep your clients happy because now you’re suddenly divorced again and have to pay for private health insurance.

And even as I write this, I feel like a whiny little bitch. Because losing it is not an option. I shouldn’t even be thinking about it. I’ve plowed through life trying to do all the things, all the milestones, hoping that one day I might be good enough. Is there an award at the end if you’ve worked hard enough? Accomplished enough? And I keep fucking up. Over and over and over again. But I also keep trying. I try to focus on the children I have, rather than the children I’ve lost. I try to focus on the siblings I have, rather than the siblings I’ve lost. I try to appreciate the relationship I have, rather than dwell on the ones I lost. I try to be a good friend, even when it means I lose friends because I’m “too fierce” or “too much”. My dad would have said that some of us are just not equipped to live in this land of non-confrontational midwesterners. But then that same dad told me I was circling the drain and didn’t think much about anybody but myself when he didn’t like how direct I was being. 

Sigh.

One of my lifelong childhood friends was dealt a shit sandwich. With extra sauce. She had plenty of challenges in her childhood and then her first husband ended up with brain cancer. And he was sick for a LONG time before he died. Like 10 years long. Her mom came to live with them during this time and then her mom died, too. My friend was left with no mom, no husband and tons of medical bills. And what did she do? She picked herself up and moved to another state to start over. She met another man. And boy oh boy did he love her. She deserved this happiness, right? And then he had a motorcycle accident and almost two years later he is still trying to learn to stand on his own. He’s in a diaper and has no short term memory. Or long term memory. She works full time from home and takes care of him full time from home. She has very few resources to help her and lives in a beautiful, but isolated neighborhood in middle America. The future is unknown and more than a little frightening. But let me tell you the thing about her. SHE DOES NOT EVER LOSE IT. (she probably wouldn’t agree, but that’s because she’s one of those people who doesn’t see losing it as an option, so her version of losing it is not really losing it, but probably crying for like 10 minutes at night after she put her husband to bed and all the chores are done). She is loving and kind and generous and empathetic to everyone else’s situation. We had another friend recently get hurt feelings over something ridiculous, and while I was ready to say “Grow the fuck up”, my friend with all the life challenges at every turn wanted to hear this friend out. She apologized for hurting her feelings. That’s the kind of person she is. How is it that some people are like that and other people walk out on their children, never to be seen again?

Another sigh.

Look, it’s not a contest, I get it. There’s isn’t going to be a resilience award at the end for those who suffered and kept on keeping on. Maybe some of us just need to normalize “losing it a little” here and there. Whatever our way of losing it is. Mine, today, is being super unproductive with all the things I “should” be doing and spending a lot of the day writing and thinking instead. My therapist would say this is perfectly fine.

I’m also going to get a massage. And it feels indulgent and even wrong, in light of all the people who don’t even have enough to eat. I guess it’s better than abandoning my family to visit every continent before I die. But, that’s not totally off the table.

 lo.facciamo.insieme

When someone special dies, we lose their physical body, yes. But we lose so much more. The sound of their voice, the anticipation of meeting them for dinner, the ability to call them with a quick question, being annoyed at something they said, the struggle to find them the perfect birthday gift, the smell of their brand of soap when you hug them, the wrinkles that make up the fabric of their skin.

My dad wasn’t a big social media guy. Well, let me rephrase. He did not have his own accounts, but regularly trolled us all on my mom’s accounts. He was more of a tracker than a poster. Periodically, I’d get an invitation from him to “track my phone”. Really, dad? And then I’d let out a sigh of relief that I was not a teenager during this current time of technology. I couldn’t have gotten away with much (although it would have been easier to look up the plot of the movie I didn’t go to, so I could tell my parents what it was about when I got home from whatever nefarious thing I WAS doing).

Eventually, my dad did get an instagram account of his own. He didn’t use it a lot, but it was there. And that’s another thing you lose when someone dies. Those periodic “likes” on something you posted. I have my gripes with social media, but it’s nice knowing your people are out there. They are watching, they are possibly stalking, they are hopefully supporting, they are… alive.

But what to do with said accounts when they die? I mean, I think we are all Facebook friends with at least a couple of dead people, right? Their socials sometimes turn into de facto tribute pages, filled with once a year birthday wishes. Or sometimes people will tag their loved one in all the photos where they are missed and would normally have been. It’s sweet. It helps us hang on.

I don’t know how or why, but at some point after my dad died, my mom ended up on his instagram account. Like, she is USING his account (she has her own). It’s curious, because she didn’t have any of the actual important passwords she needed to get shit done after he was gone, but she did get on his instagram. And I only know this because one day, out of the blue, he “liked” something I had posted. These feelings ensued:

DAD!

oh yeah.

dad…….

**stomach lurches**

Since then, there have been a couple posts to his account and a periodic “like” on something I post. I didn’t say anything to my mom, and still haven’t. I have no idea why she’s doing this. Is it a mistake? Maybe to keep his spirit alive? And mom, if you’re reading this, let’s be clear: I don’t WANT to know. Please don’t ever talk to me about it. Because here’s the thing. I love it. As briefly jolting and at least slightly alarming as it was the first time, it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, I happily go into this little zone where I pretend my dad is still watching me. Participating in my life. Even tracking me, for fuck’s sake. I mean, maybe he is - somewhere out in the universe. And those periodic social media shout outs from him? They bring a comfort/longing duo that is hard to fully describe.

His user name is lo.facciamo.insieme. He was a lifetime student of the Italian language and I figured this was something meaningful to him. I never bothered to look it up. Until just this moment. The English translation is “We do it together”. And while it hurts like hell that I can’t ask him the significance of this choice (another thing lost…), at this moment, it feels a little perfect. We do this life together and when someone important leaves, we still do it together.

Thanks, mom. But please don’t ever talk to me about it. I like the magic.