@Macha Thank you for opening up to us. I'm keeping you and your family in my thoughts right now. Big hugs and good vibes for you.
I mentioned a little bit ago I was in Hospice with my brother. He had cancer and I was the only one who could visit him as they limited visitors to siblings, children, and parents because of Covid. Just two sisters and myself were allowed as our parents are deceased and he had no children. One sister couldn't go because of lung surgery. One because she was an ER nurse and got covid; she has been on Workman's comp for two months due to the long-term damage.
I spent the last three days of his life there with him. Watching someone choke to death consciously is hard especially when it is slow over a couple of weeks and they are looking to you and begging for help each time. It was not until the last few hours that he slipped from consciousness. He went a week without food and it took five days of no real material drinking. He was a skeleton at the end.
I started getting right with myself. I hadn't been able to eat for weeks through the ordeal. Nerves, stress, anxiety, and depression. I threw up everything I tried to eat for the most part. But I got a week of time off from work and used it all week to get to a point where I could just breathe and feel alive again.
I got Covid symptoms late last week. Confirmed this week.
I can barely breathe without a stabbing pain in my chest. I've been in once for low OSAT and steroids and treatments got me back up. The doctor tells me to stay active to avoid pneumonia as I'm on the verge of hospitalization and today I tried to vacuum two rooms. I was drenched in sweat and couldn't finish and I am a pretty active for an unhealthy guy.
I am very active in Civil Rights in my community. It has been rough here. I have been protesting for BLM every weekend. In my community we were accosted by 1% bike gangs and the Aryan Brotherhood. One Trump supporter choked and assaulted the campaign manager for the local democrat running against Gohmert (of recent Covid fame). The bikers have threatened my life, stared us down armed while intimidating and making us feel utterly vulnerable and unsafe.
The next rally we had (black women's march) we armed about 15 (mostly black armed) of us. I made the news.. again. Biker's drove around our march throwing nazi salutes but kept away once we were armed. It was the most peaceful protest we have had here.
I've been asked to meet with the local sheriff (when I'm through this) and community leaders to resolve tensions and had to delay things. I'm also supposed to speak not too long from now on removing a Confederate Monument from our local courthouse. I truly truly want to do these things but only after I'm in the clear healthwise. And I have anxiety I may never be the same again.
Not a plea for help. Just typing it out helps. It's not my role in my family to be weak or in need. Or at least, I have a hard time doing such -- I'm always the person that is strong or seen as the leader I guess.
Cancer sucks. Covid sucks. Black Lives Matter.
@buttercup Sometimes writing things down cements them in the memory; other times it purges things you've been bottling up. I can never tell which it's going to be when I do it, but you sound like you got something off your chest.
Thanks for trusting us with this story.
Well, it's over. She went into Hospice on Thursday, and I got the call already that she's gone. I am unbelievably thankful I got to say goodbye on Wednesday, and to hold her hand, and to tell her I love her.
I knew it would be quick, and I would almost certainly never see her alive again, but I wasn't quite prepared for it to be /this/ fast.
Thank you to everyone for the kindness and the thoughts/energy you spared. I am sure it helped ease her on her way.
I am so sorry.
There is so much smoke in the air here in Denver. I'm worried about my asthmatic father who is only ~15-20 miles away from the active burning.!
Had to put our dog to sleep this morning. 11 1/2 years. Going to miss the shit out of the old man, but he was done. He just wanted to sleep.
http://keys.aresmush.com -- Come to Chincoteague, we have ponies.
@L-B-Heuschkel said in RL Sads:
Had to put our dog to sleep this morning. 11 1/2 years. Going to miss the shit out of the old man, but he was done. He just wanted to sleep.
I'm so sorry for your loss, but thank you for being kind to your furbaby in the hardest moment.
Aw, I'm sorry. 
It sucks to lose a pet, even if you know it's coming.
@silverfox My son's dad uncle is a hot shot out here in Michigan, just flew out that way. I hope your dad stays safe and is ok.
@L-B-Heuschkel Sorry about the loss of your dog.
Approximately a year ago, I was texting with a friend and they just... stopped responding mid-conversation. It was an upbeat, casual convo. Catching up, joking around, etc.
I sent a few texts here and there over the following weeks, but nothing. The last thing, until today, was a message in November of hey I hope everything is OK, I wish I knew what happened.
I've fret over them some ever since. Because what if they had gotten injured? What if something happened to them? etc etc
Then this week, I saw them start popping up as playing games on Steam (I have my Steam set to where it alerts me when my friends are playing games; I know some people disable this, but I have a handful of people in my circle of friends where we're all happy to have people jump in and join us)... so I decided to reach out and say hi.
I doubt I'll hear back. It eats at me not knowing why they stopped replying. There'd been no fight. No disagreement. This person had been a really close friend since high school. It just came out of the blue and... it still aches. I don't think any lost friendship has ever affected me this much.
I don't think any lost friendship has ever affected me this much.
I know exactly how you feel. I've been there too. It was a combination of depression and social anxiety, in that case. "They'd be better off without me" morphed into "It's been too long for me to fix it now." I don't know if that will help you in approaching your friend, but in case it does, I thought I'd share.
Good news!
He got back to me. Last year was really rough on him and he shut down pretty much across the board. Said he was glad I reached out. We've been catching up.
I wish he hadn't shut me out or maybe that I'd been more insistent on trying to get in touch. But what's past is past and things moving forward will be better.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
I just had a friend of 27 years block me on Facebook, so I had to find out that his husband finally died after a long bout with kidney failure and a short bout with aggressive lymphoma (courtesy of the immunosuppressant drugs he had to take so that his body wouldn't reject the kidney said friend donated to him) by going to fan pages for his band.
Now, I've been quietly frustrated with this friend for a while now, as it seemed like I always had to be the one to initiate conversation, or that I was only considered a 'dear friend' when I was throwing money at them (everything from setting up fundraisers to traveling internationally to be there for benefit gigs and such). He would post things on Facebook railing against the Danish medical system and government, accusing them of ageism and homophobia and malpractice, then beg people for more money whilst posting exploitative misery porn photos of his sick husband in hospital. It did not sit well with me.
I would try to have gentle conversations with him about different steps he could take in regards to his husband's care, and was always met with resistance and complaints. It baffled me that he didn't take advantage of any home caretaker services, given that I'd seen other Danish friends obtain the same services with no issues, courtesy of their national health program. From my perspective, the eldercare alone should have been a no-brainer, and taken advantage of, so that he wasn't stuck being sole caretaker. Of course, you need to actually pay your taxes to be able to take advantage of these things, and that was evidently something that he hadn't been doing.
I probably should have realized that I didn't matter much anymore, in comparison to the thousand opportunistic fans willing to make sympathetic noises and unquestioningly support him (at least on Facebook; when it came to actually purchasing his music it was a bit of a different story) when my family made plans to go and visit him and some of my other Danish friends a couple of years ago. After we'd settled on dates and airfares were bought, he went and booked a gig in Calgary during the time I was going to be there. I asked if his husband (who was barred from traveling outside the EU at this point for health reasons) would be interested in our traveling from Zealand up to Jutland to take him out for lunch or something so that he could see my son, at least, and got turned down. My other Danish friends (who are also part of what remains of his social circle) were pretty gobsmacked by this.
Now, while this is all hurtful, I do also understand that the man has been suffering and grieving for the past ten years, or so, the state of his husband's health. He's also been struggling with major depressive disorder for ages (same as I have). I fully get the way depression eats away at friendships, and that decisions made in the throes of it are rarely good ones, but this is the same man who would refer to me as his 'soulmate' and extol my ability to make people feel safe and comfortable (his words, not mine) and thank me on releases (shit, my son is even on one of his songs doing spoken word)...and now I can't even express my condolences because he will never see them.
Up until last Thursday he was still reacting to FB memory posts of cute/weird shit my son was doing, and then nothing. My depression makes me wonder if it was some kind of fucked-up, passive-aggressive friendship test and I failed living up to whatever expectations he had of me (and never disclosed). I had stopped pro-forma reacting to posts of his a while back because they gave me so much fremdscham (vicarious embarrassment) due to being a steady stream of begging for money and complaining about Danish healthcare, and had deliberately distanced myself because I couldn't handle all the half-truths I was getting and rumor-mongering going on. I had to distance myself, or I would have been spending all my energy and time trying to solve his problems for him, because that's how I tend to operate.
It just sucks that he would rather have a thousand strangers blowing smoke up his ass and coddling him rather than keep actual friends who call him out on his fuckery like real friends should.
I tend to bail on people and not speak to them again because either a) they don't realize that they need a therapist and not a friend, or b, the more likely one,) I suffer from intense chronic depression and just in case I commit suicide I'd rather have you think I'm a fucking asshole who ghosted you rather than be a burden.
I just can't catch a break. My aunt in August, an old friend in September, and my grandmother passed away suddenly this evening.
She's my stepmonster's mother, but I've called her grandma since I was 7. She distanced herself the last couple years, especially since my father died, but I still care.
This will sound weird, but a couple hours after she passed, all of a sudden I could taste caramel corn. Like the taste was so thick in my mouth, I could have been eating it. But that was her thing. If I went to the mall where the caramel corn stand is, I had to bring her some. I'm choosing to decide that means she was saying goodbye.
@hedgehog I'm sorry to hear it.
Sometimes, yeah, it can be that sort of thing where life is just too much and it's too hard... but also, as we've discussed here on the board? You aren't responsible for someone else's shitty behavior.
Like, distancing, isolating, etc: these are all typical of depression. But people who...... abuse their trauma, as it were? That's not excusable. The suffering is, yes. Harming others isn't. You did what you had to do for your mental health. Don't ever regret that.
@Macha This is not weird at all, at least not to me and I don't believe in woogie or woogie adjacent stuff. The day my dad died, I woke up with a horrible stomach ache around 4 a.m. and not long after I got the phone call. It wasn't until a few hours later when I found when my dad passed I realized that the pains that woke me up were in the same window of time when he died. Some things just can't be explained and sometimes, maybe it's better without an explanation.
May her memory be a blessing.
