A Never-Ending Tide – The First Update of 2024 · 11:19pm January 12th
Posted via mobile.
I’ll level with you, readers: everything still feels almost unreal.
Just this morning, I woke to a reminder that one year ago, I’d written the newest entry in a regular collection of “New Year” posts, or posts about what I was looking forward to and working toward in the coming year.
Today, I don’t have one of those. And last year’s was unexpectedly derailed as is, so looking back drives right into a disaster that I’m still personally enmeshed in.
The short of it, if you’re just now stopping by, is that a few days before Thanksgiving a titanic landslide completely annihilated my parent’s property and took the life of my dad. Everything on site was destroyed. You can read more about what I’ve said up until now here, as this post is going to deliver updates for what came after that point and where things are planned to go from here. Both for my immediate efforts and in this coming year.
Obviously this post is going to be a little different than normal, but I hope you all understand. I’m still dealing with the grief, as well as still physically facing the reality of what happened every single day. I know I’m not at 100%, but there’s not much I can do about that right now except keep pushing forward. But as you, readers, have been left without updates for almost a month, and I definitely don’t like leaving the site quiet for that long, today marks a semi-return to things “as normal.”
As to what that means, and what I’ve been up to, and all that other news, mixed with a little bit of raw emotion, hit the jump.
Oh hun, sending all my best wishes and vibes to you and your loved ones. Here's hoping the pain is never too overwhelming and things go smoothly.
I held my bit until now because I know I didn't have anything especially helpful to say as events originally unfolded. Another instance of "I'm sorry for your loss" didn't seem like the best use of my own energy when I knew that would only be the beginning. I figured I would put in my two cents later.
And now... it seems like your post mirrors my own situation, though I sincerely don't mean to make comparisons. So I've come to let you know that I understand the spot you're in. (I'm sure there are others, too, who are quite probably burdened with their own situations; I do try and think of more than just the people who can drop a comment or blog post regularly.) But rather than just telling you...
Two years ago now, my father left the house. We had less than a month to prepare for anything, because we only found out that there was a problem about a month before, right before he had a (minor but significant) surgery. All of the stability I had in my life went out the window, and over the next two years I got to unbury every reason the last ten years of my life were so hard. And while I lost my father as a father, he's also still out there, actively trying to destroy anything my mother has left.
This is almost certainly a mental health issue, but in the US he can do everything he wants despite some of it being extremely risky because he won't see a doctor and the lawyers don't care. There was a divorce, which he initiated right when my mother had to deal with the passing of her own father.
And then we get the slog; cut off from finances, "therapy" for my underage siblings, meetings with the lawyers that make you want to vomit, working in the handout windows to pick up food from churches so my family has food, and finally a forced move from the one home my family ever owned. There was an entire month when we spent 18 hour days sorting through and cleaning the house so it could be sold, and lemme tell you that wasn't just 20+ years of memories. The signs that things had been getting worse over the last decade existed too. The trees we planted had to stay.
And during my own frantic attempts to make ends meet I found that all platforms that I could manage to dig up would share my name and location or assume that the money was to be taxed, and I couldn't ask for help in anything less than anonymous else there was the risk that the lawyers would find it and the financial boon would be held against us. So no fimfiction drive for me. (It turns out this is frequently a problem for domestic violence victims.)
And now I have to fix up the new place because that's how we could afford it, meanwhile driving long range for medical appointments and custody handoffs. I am still tired from that month of 18 hour days, but maybe it's everything else, too...
We're still unpacking, so in that sense it's like unburying the useful or valuable things. Moving in a rush makes for an unimaginable mess to sort through, so it's taken over a year and we're not even done.
And nothing has magically gone right, but some spectacular things have gone wrong. I still need to get a car checked out because the brakes are either terribly uneven or some of the wheels can lock up, which sent me on a 180 spin when I tried to stop from a whopping 35mph.
... and yet I just keep going. I don't lnow how much I believe it, but the only way out is forwards; there's no reason to turn around or stop, at any rate.
And there's another reason you (probably) don't go into more detail: it's almost incomprehensible how much you have to weather in the moment and you just do not have the energy to describe it all while it's happening (and you're lucky to remember it well later).
So that's a long winded post about me in order to say "Hell yeah, you're tired." I don't know if it'll ever really end, to be honest, but I figure every time you accomplish something despite the grief and the pain, that's evidence that you still have the power to shape your life. Still, I wish you the best.
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I'm sorry to hear that you're going through all that. It just sounds awful from start to present, and I'm sorry.
Which doesn't seem like a lot, saying it. I know exactly what you mean about just a line. But it does mean something.
I hope things get better for you (and that writing down even a small portion of it helped in some way).
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I'm mostly just impressed I managed to keep the summary as succinct as I did. I did manage to
twist a few earsgather a few friends to ramble at as things happened early on (and it does help, even if only a bit sometimes), so this time it's actually primarily intended to show that I do have the capacity to understand the sort of thing you're going through to lend credibility to my attempt to provide you with some validation.But I'd also be a fool to turn down your own well wishes, so thanks!