Monday, November 10, 2014

a husk, experiencing the strange stresses

In the few days after my mother's death, I've taken up a regime of day-drinking ("Champagne, which is a breakfast drink", I informed the Sober Husband) and day-eating on the couch.  This was interrupted yesterday by a phone call informing the Sober Husband that one of his brothers had died.  Bizarrely it turns out that the brother in question had passed away around the same time as my mother, but had not been discovered for a few days as he was living alone after his divorce.

7 comments:

Louise said...

Gosh. That is a LOT of stress to deal with at once. Be strong...!

Anonymous said...

I have been reading your blog for years, but never commented. I always observe the run up to your birthday with some interest and trepidation because, while I'm honestly neither here nor there about the whole experience, you are one of the few people I know who shares my birthday. So even though my blog reading has become more sporadic as the years have gone on, I usually remember to check in around this time. Not that your hatred of your birthday particularly makes me feel differently about mine, just that it's a weird kinship I feel with you, especially since I've just realized that you were also born in a year ending in 4, so we run into milestones at the same time, albeit different ones. Only took me years of casual blog perusing to catch on to that.

I'm not sure what the point of this is except that I know your birthday isn't a great time of year anyway, and I'm sorry that the past six months seem to have been determined to repeatedly punch you in the face in creatively awful ways, over and over and over. This offers precisely zero tangible assistance, but I will be thinking of you this time of year as always, and hoping that your reserves of strength keep you going.

Happy almost-birthday to us.

Kate said...

Wow. Thinking of you too. I had the triple whammy starting with my mother's death five years ago. It was either become an alcoholic or grow. I grew, but it was hell.

the Drunken Housewife said...

@Kate: what were your other whammies?

@Louise: thanks!

@my anon birthday twin: I used to go to a hair salon that kept a giant book about how your birthday dictates your personality. I don't believe in astrology but looked up our birthday, after visit after visit of watching people look theirs up and act all ennobled and falsely humble. Our day was trashed! I paraphrased it as "THe Day of the Whiny Loser"after reading it. I looked very closely through this book on further visits, and ours was only one of 2 days of the year trashed like that. It was funny in a horrible way. Happy milestone birthday to you a few days in advance!

Kate said...

After my mother's unexpected death, my (now ex) husband (father of my 3 kids) starting cheating on me in a really shitty and public way for about a year until I made him choose. During that time I also transitioned out of a business that I had founded with a business partner and that I thought would be my life's work.

B/c of the divorce, I moved out of our 100 year old farmhouse (as I was not interested in maintaining it or heating with wood on my own). So mother, life-partner, job, and home, all that I thought were forever, were gone. Just me and my kids. Those were the only certain things left.

I'm doing amazingly great now though, 5 1/2 years later!

the Drunken Housewife said...

Kate, thank you for coming back and sharing. That is really a metric fuckton of stress to deal with. Glad you made it through.

Kate said...

And what's crazy is that then a year and half ago I had some stuff that was even MORE difficult than all of that with my teenage son that I won't get into here, but it really made me think that if there was some higher power trying to get my attention that somehow he thought that metric fuckton hadn't been enough!!!

But again, now I'm doing great.