A New Beginning

It has not been the best start to the New Year. As I would imagine most of you know at this point, my stepfather died a week ago today. I had mentioned his health issues, somewhat anonymously, in my final post of 2015 and my early posts for 2016. Unfortunately, his cancer had reached the point where there was just no beating it. As much as it hurts to lose him, I’m thankful that he is no longer suffering.

I realized, after talking to other folks who were closer to him, that he never gave me the true story of how sick he was. He hid test results from me. He was not honest about his pain levels. And so on. For some reason he decided he didn’t want to worry me about his situation. Which seems silly, because I was already pretty worried! I just hope that he wasn’t in more pain than he otherwise could have been because he was too stubborn to tell anyone about it.

I appreciate all the support I’ve received from so many of you, whether through text, phone calls, emails, or my friends who attended the memorial service. Honestly that all helps a lot, whether you realize it or not.

So here we are on January 18 and I feel like the New Year never really started for me. I left for Jefferson City the first time on New Year’s Day afternoon. I spent nine of the first 16 days of the year there. When I was back home between trips, I honestly just kind of sat around and waited for the calls I dreaded but knew were coming. I still have cleaning I need to begin from the holidays. There were some projects I wanted to begin after the girls went back to school that are still sitting idle. From the blog’s perspective, I still need to run through my December book list, share a bunch of links that have been sitting around for nearly a month now, and try to get back on a regular schedule here.

Writing here has always been both a way of keeping in touch with my friends scattered around the country and a kind of therapy. I don’t share all my thoughts, concerns, or worries, but I do crank many of them out here. So while it may seem odd to list “posting to the blog” as an item for getting back to normal, it is really something that is important to me.

February 1998 was a really bad month for me. That was the month when my mom died. I had a group of friends who also went through bad patches of one kind or another that month. On February 28, a buddy invited us all to his house. We were going to order pizza, drink a lot, and as the clock ticked toward midnight, we would countdown as if it was New Year’s Eve. We would put the bitch that was February in our past and hope that March brought better times for all of us.

I’m not going to be quite so dramatic about it, but as today is a holiday, I’m going to use it as an excuse to reboot my 2016. It’s been a really shitty three weeks. It’s time for things to get better.