It’s weird to me to look at my blog and realize that I haven’t posted anything to it since the end of May, as so much has happened since then and I have spent so much time since then writing out my thoughts and feelings in a journal, often in the form of a rough draft blog post or something that I intended to finish and post.

But the nature of journaling, for me, is about processing the now. So what I don’t finish when I first down to write, I don’t often come back to. I’ll make an effort to post some of it, though. 

So, I’ve had a rough time. I feel weird about dropping this on my blog two months later, but: my mother died. My emotions around this are very strong. On the one hand my family tends to be philosophical about these things .On the other hand, my mother is dead. In a real sense I feel like my time is my own for the first time in years. I mean, it was always my own, but I chose to spend it in ways that allowed me to spend more time with her and helped her and my father manage their situation.

I look back at the past half decade and think about opportunities I passed on and projects I couldn’t quite commit to, deals I didn’t quite manage to seal… and if I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same. If I changed anything, it would be to tell myself things I only really figured out towards the end that would have allowed me to help more.

But as the proverbial fruit flies like a banana, time flies like an arrow and once loosed, it cannot be recalled to the bow. I can’t do it all over again. That choice is made and will always remain made.

Now the future lies before me. It’s taken me a while to adjust to the new reality. I do so in the knowledge that tomorrow is never promised. One thing I grappled with a lot in recent years and more especially the first half of this year is the paired knowledge that any day my mother might die, and that this was true, had always been true, and would remain true until she did. It was also true that she might have outlived me. Nothing is promised. “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” et cetera.

Complicating factors in all this: my family gathered twice to remember my mother, once as a private matter in Florida, which became her second home for reasons both practical and sentimental, and once as a public celebration back in Nebraska. There was no funeral in the traditional sense, per her wishes and our beliefs. Traveling twice in rapid succession and being around hundreds of people… my immune system was not in the best shape to begin with. I came back from Florida sick and a few days later was traveling to Nebraska, where I think I caught approximately all the germs.

I think it’s a rare year that I don’t catch a summer cold that knocks me on my backside for a couple weeks. This was… in a lot of ways, it was not the worst? I could control the coughing. It was only really bad for a week.

Mostly I slept. My body’s metabolism is such that the mere act of having an immune system can exhaust me, so when I get sick I don’t get better until I allow myself to shut down. So now I’m in the process of recovering from recovery: rebuilding my stamina, getting an actual sleep schedule, resuming all the pills I went off when I started medicating for the cold, etc.

My brain is going to remain partially fog-bound until I’ve been back on my normal regimen for several more days and until I have got my sleep schedule sorted.

That aside, I’m already making plans for how I want to spend my next five years. Tomorrow is promised to no one, but on the off chance that it happens anyway, I know what I want to do with it.