State of the Ivy address

September 7, 2007 in enough about me, let's talk about me

It’s been almost exactly a week since my mom blurted out “Grandma Hogan is DEAD” on the phone to me and I howled “Noooooooooo” at her, like I could stop it or change it. It was about 1 o’clock last Friday that happened, and here I am nearly a week later, still alive, still functioning, but barely.

First, I’d like to thank everyone for their kind words, emails, phone calls, text messages, etc, etc, etc. I don’t know that I have emailed everyone back personally to thank them and I don’t know if I can now. Somehow, it seems very hard to just write “Thank you for your condolences, it is very appreciated”. So, if you haven’t gotten anything back from me, I am very sorry. Know that it IS appreciated, I just suck in the politeness arena right now.

I suck in a whole lot of ways right now anyway. I spent the first few hours after I found out bawling, then I dried up the tears and went to work putting out fires. Not literally, I didn’t suddenly change my career and become a firewoman- though that might be an interesting gig- I was trying to keep the family drama to a minimum, and I managed it, mostly.

The funeral was Monday and again, I managed to keep everyone from killing each other. I had to drive my uncle back to Muncie, Indiana and I managed to keep from killing him. While I was up there, I stayed at my cousin Steph’s new house and marveled at her new BIG screen TV and PS3 and brand new car and new furniture and watched her boyfriend and his brother fight in Spanish.

Drove back to Tennessee, kissed the ground, happy to be back, and then sat at Mom’s house for many hours, waiting for my brother and Aaron to get back from running all over Nashville, looking for a Wii. We all deal with grief in different ways. I stop eating, Mom buys video game consoles. BTW, the Wii rocks, it was all I could do not to rush out and buy one too, once I played with it.

And then there was Wednesday, I didn’t do a damn thing. I meant to go back to work on Thursday, but I couldn’t face it. St. Mark probably deals with grief by throwing himself into work (which, btw, I saw him cry for the very first time in my entire life. I told him that was the very first time I had seen him cry and he said, “Really? That’s surprising.” Like he goes around crying all the time and I had just somehow missed it.) but I am dealing with my grief by withdrawing from everything. My appetite has completely followed suit.

Which, btw, has made me a very unreliable grocery shopper. We had virtually no food in the house on Friday when this all has happened and I can’t bear to shop for lengthy periods of time, so I’ve been going to the store and buying little bits of things as needed. I generally get what we require, but I also buy completely random things that we either already have plenty of, or nobody likes, or ham. I’ve been buying a lot of ham. I don’t know why. I gave up pork. Hell, I gave up meat in general, but not lately. Seems the only thing I can choke down is meat.

Today, everything looks very bleak and unreal. On Friday, when Jim came back to my mom and dad’s after getting off work, Megs said to him, “Daddy, Grandma Hogan died, but it’s okay. We’re all over it now.” I told her no, we were not all over it. But I thought I’d be doing a lot better than I am. I’m not, though. I can hardly bear to do anything, I just want to sleep. And anyone that knows me knows I am not a sleeper.  I went to bed around 6 PM last night. And I woke up at 8 AM. I can only hope that I’m exhausted from the great drive to Indiana and this is temporary.

Interestingly, Aaron keeps getting newspaper clippings from Grandma. She always used to read the newspaper and clip things out and save them or give them to people she thought would like them. Aaron keeps waking up with newspaper clippings on his floor that were not there the night before. It would be cool if there was some sort of message to them, something like, “Heaven rocks, I’m keeping an eye out on you, don’t cry for me”, but it’s weird stuff like “There was a tornado in Kansas in 1939 on the date that the movie Wizard of Oz came out”. And a comic about how fun it is to pop bubble wrap. It makes Aaron feel better, though. I wish she’d send me a newspaper clipping, but I think maybe Aaron needs that more than I do. When Aaron was little, he’d have breakfast with her and they’d read the newspaper together.

Anyway, I’m getting back to the living, maybe by next week I’ll be feeling fairly normal.