While We Wait For Life, Life Passes

I feel like my life has been on pause for the last two and a half years.  We have done so much as a family, and evolved so much as human beings striving to become the best possible versions of ourselves, but there is a part of my brain that is still staring down at my father’s body, stuck in the nightmarish void of everything that followed.  The last couple years with my family have been all the highs and lows of a forever changing life, generally for the better, whether we liked it or not, but under the deep psychological shadow of this probate court process that may or may not come to an end in the morning, when I walk into a Palm Springs courthouse for the first time because of Covid and the convenient legal “zoom” process that was created as a byproduct. I don’t even know what to expect at this point, so I have taken on the philosophy that served me well when I was working in a high volume kitchen: Prepare for the worst; hope for the best. 

I have found that approach, everything becomes a pleasant surprise because rarely is anything as bad as the worst that you prepared for. I must admit, though, that this process has presented many a situation that I couldn’t have prepared for, because I didn’t know most of these scenarios existed, nor do most of them make any sense to me now, but I have jumped through all the hoops, I have danced like a good little monkey for this Dali-esque law system that angers me beyond reason, and not because I don’t understand it, but because it is an unnecessarily complex man-made absurdity that absolutely embodies everything I don’t like about this existence. 

Why didn’t I just get a lawyer? Why didn’t I just hire somebody else to handle all of this so I could mourn in peace… or at all? The money spent on that would’ve ended up saving us significantly in the end… in the maybe now. I do, however, significantly appreciate this experience, as with most others that seem miserable at the time. There is a part of me that has always appreciated getting dragged through the shit, just to feel the reward of making it through. 

It is all these little letter people and word events that compile the stories of our lives… our lives that are given to us to be lived, not for us to give to someone else to write. Had I hired a lawyer, my story would be very different, with a little less of life experienced and known, as only one who has experienced can know. That has always been my preferred story; without experience, the work is reduced to fantasy, to pointless day-dreaming that exists to add excitement to an unenchanted life, prevalent in today’s paradigm of living in our phones and zooming in our court appearances. 

I don’t need someone else’s imagination to distract me from my story, so here I am, staring at my father’s body in California, posting photos we took in Nebraska, to follow up a post from Nebraska with photos we took in California. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have the emotional freedom to finally look at grief? I have started reading again in Omaha, after getting stuck on a book about peptides for nine months that didn’t even quench my thirst for a deeper understanding of the Kambo process, but did help me understand peptides from a pharmaceutical application… so….. ok? 

The Omaha library actually presented me with a few amazing books (most the books I read aren’t ones you would find in a library). The first one was probably the best broad overview of the history of philosophy I’ve ever read, A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry, and the latter is an in depth look at correctly naming our emotions by Brené Brown, in which I have already discovered that my lack of understanding grief could very well be because I have lived just about my entire life in grief because I never lived in a world that made any sense to me, so grief is a very complex byproduct of simply existing. 

That might explain why the little emotion I felt in discovering my father’s body was resentment because he left me here, before I even realized the shit he left for me to deal with?… with a sprinkle of envy because he got out of the matrix, and I’m silly enough to think I have more to do in this… thusness… when instead I should be sitting with the much needed reminder from Luc Ferry, reminiscing about Epictetus and Aurelius:

“You are not there to change things, to improve them, or to correct them; you are there to admire and accept things. It is somewhat in this spirit that Stoicism encourages us to reconcile ourselves to what is, to the present as it occurs, without hopes and regrets. Stoicism invites us to enjoy these moments of grace, and, to make them as numerous as possible, it suggests that we change ourselves rather than the order of things.”  Pg. 46-7