bellulah wrote:i just got divorced recently. she just left me without a word.

Up and left.

Without a word.

Jesus Christ.

What.

The.

Fuck.

This is unfair and terrible.

I am sorry.

Salut, bellulah.

Peripatetic wrote:My future father in law had open heart surgery on Monday. The night before the surgery my fiancee and I left the hospital to run our stuff over to the hotel before coming back to tell him goodnight. When we came back in, he and his wife (the future mother-in-law) had obviously just finished a good cry. Seeing that choked me up. It's weird, dads are supposed to be superheroes. It almost kind of sucks to realize once in awhile that they're human.

Musically:

Ferocious Love by Aloha

multiple Bedhead and The New Year songs

That scene in Twin Peaks where Donna and James are at the Roadhouse and Julee Cruise is singing Rockin' Back Inside My Heart.

Dude...that Twin Peaks song rules all.

On 9/27/00 my mother had two aneurysms rupture in her brain. She survived, but has been mentally handicapped ever since. Her behavior is much like someone in the early advanced stages of Alzheimer's, but slightly more manic. After spending a year trying to care for her at home, we evenetually decided that she would be better off with the structure and routine of a specialized facility.

I visit her every week. Some weeks are good, and some are bad. Last week I visited her and she was so disoriented and confused that she cried and yelled almost the entire time I was there. She would get angry one moment, as though she had some clue as to what was going on, and then she would cry the next, again seeming to have an emotional impression of her life but no actual thought to which she could attach the origin of the feeling. It's impossible to describe.

Every now and then she has what seems like a brief flicker of clarity...even for one second. As I left the facility to go home, I turned around and said 'I love you...see you next week' and she said 'Why did this happen to me...I'm scared'. I stopped to try to talk to her about it, but the thought had passed.

I cried the entire 35 minute drive home...at the thought of her helplessness, at the though of my helplessness, at my pity for her and at how there is no end to her situation.

bigc wrote:Every now and then she has what seems like a brief flicker of clarity...even for one second. As I left the facility to go home, I turned around and said 'I love you...see you next week' and she said 'Why did this happen to me...I'm scared'. I stopped to try to talk to her about it, but the thought had passed.

bigc, thank you for sharing this beautiful, heartbreaking and terrifying moment with us.

bigc, I will tell you that I have gotten "choked up" reading your post.

Salut, bigc.

Am I finally secure enough to chime in on this topic? Maybe!

Almost lost it (translation: lost it) the other night while listening to SKWM's "Written on the Wind." I just moved to NY. Hate it. Ate some food that had me hurling earlier. Going to grad school that is not quite what I expected, and paying a lot to do so. Turned down other school that was essentially free for me. Now I'm not sure why.

bellulah: that is some horrible shit. It angers me immensely. I'm very sorry that you're having to go through that.

Connor

Last winter, January.
I had only been living in Arizona for a couple months and I hadn't made many friends here.
I got word that one of my new friends, Katie, had died from a heroin overdose. I didn't even know she smoked pot let alone struggled with H.
I didn't cry at first, but I lost it at the wake. She was only 21, and a very sweet, stylish person. Her death was senseless.

My maternal grandfather, one who I owe a tremendous debt for musical genes, passed away at the end of June.

He was a short, powerfully built man, who had been a farmer, a teacher, a principal. He had such physical and spiritual strength. A classic patriarch, but gentle. He worked hard every single day of his life, excepting Sundays. A couple years ago, at age 83, he felled a large tree, chopped it into firewood, hauled it all away, and yanked the stump.

A warm, quiet, yet extremely funny man (youngest brother of 12), he contracted walking pneumonia and bronchitis just after Christmas, 2004.
It's my conjecture that he had the tiniest of strokes, because for the next six months as he battled his illnesses, he had problems swallowing - the orignal source of the pneumonia. He was sick and declining for six months.

The week that he passed, one of my dearest cousins, and her husband, visited him on a Tuesday. They broke the wonderful news to him that he was going to be a great-grandfather. By all reports, he was beaming, telling everyone he saw that day the good news.

He passed quietly early early Wednesday. More than anyone I know, he deserved to be tired, and to rest.

I cried at the service, mostly the grimacing, choking-back type, and held it together to say some words of our wonderful, unique relationship and my rememberences of how his life has been a model for me.

After my duties as a pallbearer concluded, I broke.


This summer. It holds the black grip on my heart.

I have been on the verge of tears here in work since I read the updated stories about New Orleans. I can't believe it's the same place that I visited for TapeOp only weeks ago.

Bellulah - you have my sympathies. What an awful, awful thing to have happen.

BigC - you have choked me up too with your post. I can't imagine holding it together at all if my own mother was in the same situation.

Salut to you all, beloved EA board members.

i had to travel for my job for the last 3 years. I would be gone 1 or 2 months at a time, then home a few days, then gone again. For about 8 months out of the year. I have a daughter who is 2 and a half, every time I had to leave I would cry a little. This year I changed things up where I won't have to travel anymore.

I saw Harold and Maude late at night sometime in the past few months. I usually mist up at the end of that.

last night I watched a special about a man who was choked by his umbillical cord at birth and was basically mute and paralyzed for life, but his father would run marathons pushing him in a wheelchair. I was pretty choked up.