island

Hey, I got through the second night.  I'm not sleeping enough.

Yesterday two friends came to sit with me, afternoon then evening, and both brought food.  I'm kind of confused how I have such nice friends.

One brought candy also, and one brought special rocks they found.  "I keep telling myself not to bring home more rocks, then come home with rocks in my pockets!" they said.  The food was pasta with mushrooms, then a lovely spinach salad.

You know me--I like eating salad with my hands.  I picked up the spinach leaves to eat individually.  Then some carrot shreds, almond bits, olive bits, and quinoa sprinklies, I ate with my fork.  Why am I telling you this?  Salad dressing can be such a problem, and picking up my salad to eat with my hands means I don't have to decide about the dressing--I can sidestep that whole question.

Learning how to be the grieving person.  I was telling Ming and G how having a baby, the baby is public, that strangers come up to you and ask questions that seem weird to me, as if they deserve to know the gender of the baby or how old they are.

I feel a little that way too, getting advised about grief or how the afterlife works, or how Mom was, by people who might not have met her.  I want to be not overly-cranky about it.  I could avoid having a kid, but I couldn't avoid being a grieving person.

I guess I could run away to a beach on some island no one knows about, hang out for six months, and hope when I came back, everyone forgot my mom died.

With someone--who was it?--oh yeah, R.  We were fantasizing about getting me a shirt that said, "Just don't."  People would come up to me and start telling me how cancer such and such, or the embrace of Jesus, and I could point to the shirt.

I'm imagining the shirt yellow, with black print.  Maybe I could wear it all the time.  Any unwanted conversation, I could point to the shirt.  Not just for grieving.

Living on earth is expensive, but includes a free annual trip around the sun--so too, living in society has its challenges, but I need to be a nice grieving person, right?  The price I pay for people caring is people caring.

I'm not talking about you, reader.  I don't want to make you paranoid about comforting me.  The death response sentences are nothing personal.  I know some of them are much older than I am.