I Could Murder A Curry

I wouldn't think to make a claim anywhere near as bold as "things are mostly back to normal" when I'm posting on a Friday after like 15 years of compulsive Thursday-ing. Plus it feels kind of disrespectful to my dad, who went all the way out of his way to do something as momentously notable as dying (you only get one crack at it!), to say after, like, two weeks we're all back to exactly how we were before when he put in 71 years of being totally alive just to build to this point. I hate to say this, and you can't really know until after the fact how it's going to land, but his grand finale was way more Game of Thrones than Breaking Bad, if you know what I mean. Overly grim, a bit dark, fairly rushed... all those years of careful setup just to sort of fast-forward clumsily to an abrupt and unsatisfying end. Although I will say, as a committed lifelong alcoholic and smoker, the end did honor some long-game character choices better than GoT did. God bless you, Emilia Clarke. You did all you could.

But that's the thing about grief, you life-advice goals assigned to you by other well-intentioned people. You know, the type who start sentences with "You know, the best thing is..." as a non sequitur in your conversation about literally anything excluding a suggestion of what the best thing might be. Libyan floods, Moroccan earthquakes, Aaron Rodgers' Achilles heel, whatever dire world-disaster you might be talking about, they're just going to volunteer the emotional solution to the idea of one of your parents moldering.

I know people are a) just trying to be helpful or b) looking to lay down a marker so they can check in 80-100 times in the next 14 days to see if they can reap some credit for being the one who suggested the Magic Thing that made it all OK, even if the suggestions only range from either the blatantly obvious to the so hyper-specifically impractical they could only be explained by being part of a multilevel marketing scam. The list of things that are typically the "best thing":

• time
• patience
• throw yourself into work
• faith
• family (leaning on)
• friends (being around)
• food
• this book you have to read, it helped them so much when grandma died
• Dianetics (separate category from the above just because of the financial implications)
• crystals
• ayahuasca (mostly middle-aged white people with some money)

The closest to any of those that I've actually tried is "throw yourself into work" but that wasn't by choice, I'd just burned through a lot of vacation and I want to save some for the holidays. I avoided going back as much as I could. Even though I was back from Michigan, I still took my two bereavement days after Labor Day and just hung out and played Baldur's Gate III a lot. It doesn't sound typical for the grieving process, but I felt better about doing that than I have at any point catching up on emails about temporary IT outages of the email service for regular monthly maintenance patching or whatever. This week was my first full week back and sure, I was distracted I suppose, but it's possible for something to work exactly as intended and still resent the fuck out of it. I think that's how my ex wife describes the whole latter third of our marriage.

I've also been weirdly social this week. I've gone months and months with really no takers on the dating apps and all of a sudden this week I had first or second dates on four out of six nights, with other offers pending. It's either they can smell the grief pheromones wafting through Bumble or Hinge or whatever (I don't remember opting in for that setting) or me leaving the state and coming back somehow reinserted me into the search algorithm more prominently as "new," so I'm more easily findable.

The result has been fun and interesting, but exhausting. I don't want to give the wrong impression, it's not like I'm out there banging it out with everyone I meet, these are mature professional adults of an appropriate age, so we're all the right amount of circumspect and wary. It's just that some of us happen to live in Canoga Park or other places we've only vaguely heard of that exist off freeways we possibly haven't. Whether the date goes well* or not, four hours of driving there and back in total really pushes the ole sleep budget. You like to give people a chance, but maybe we're learning to put in some emotional as well as literal physical boundaries and steer clear of 818.

I'm giving myself a lot of leeway here since I've never had a dead parent before. I'm making it up as I go. Having it be an intermittent parent with whom I shared an amiable but tangential relationship makes it either easier or worse, I can't tell. But the "worse" just looks like I'm a bit too blithely shaking it off, not a rib-wracking, diaphragm-cracking sob fest where I can't muster the basic composure to function amongst other humans out of doors. I'm sad, sure, but I feel like I'm tanking it pretty well. It's been a while since they updated the "stages of grief" thing I think. If it's anything like advice about how to manage cholesterol, I'm sure it's changed 200 times, usually in diametrically opposed directions, since the 1970s. Maybe the most modern ones have a "numb, staring at screens" phase instead of, I don't know, bargaining or whatever. But it would be hard to tell since we've all been in that phase, grieving or not, since about 2009.

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*This is not a euphemism for sex, you perv. A date can go perfectly well without anyone getting boned. What's important is that everyone feels like we've made progress toward eventually getting boned at the very least. Grow up.