The Unfathomable alternative

Today I went back to work.

I had to. Since I'm still new there, I haven't built up much pto, so I've had a lot of unpaid time off lately with my mom's descent into a brutal unnecessary death. I won't have enough to cover my portion of my mortgage or most of my bills. I have some savings and credit cards, so I'll figure it out. Yes, we're still going in to work. Manufacturing aren't required closures under the order.

But it's hard to complain since I need the money and at least I still have a job. So far. And hey, at least traffic is better. But it's all different now. The darkness of my mother's death is sinking in like the days after a hideous car crash. Right after it's not so bad, strangely.

But today, trying to be "normal" doing "normal" things in the darkest chapters of American history, at least in my life, well, it was difficult to say the least. My faith in god is gone. My patience with stupidity is shot. My anger is ripe and the shock waves of despair, while less frequent, still hit me like tsunami waves I have no way of dodging. I seize up. Forget what I'm thinking. Get that throw-up feeling of tears well up in my throat again, my eyes fill, my head throbs, and I am crippled, taken right back to those...moments.

When she is in that bed.

Eyes floating around in their brain shattered blindness, seeing nothing. Mouth gaping, gasping for air.

Dying.

That smell of antiseptic liquids and sickness. Her life slipping away in front of me as I sat there, day after day, night after night, praying to a fucking god that isn't there, that turned their fucking back on us and her, as I was staying positive that she might just wake up. But she's not. She's going to die. Just like you will one day. But not like she's dying. No, she's really dying.

Soon.

Painlessly they say, giving you the game show buzzer of dilaudin, that you can send into her body every six minutes. They keep adding atavan to relax her shredded, broken mind as she lives through god only fucking knows in that limbo of hell she described before her mind was ripped away. When she could still talk and tell jokes.

She's dying.

And I am frozen at my desk, the dual monitors waiting for my next command and I'm not even there anymore. I'm there. Again. Right there. It's clear as the screens in front of me. And I have to thank well...not god anymore, but maybe my "good" fortune that I still have a job right now. I have to remind myself that this all too shall pass.

Perhaps I will have a better day tomorrow.

All I really know, though, is that tomorrow is a long fucking time from now and I am doing everything in my power to make it to the next minute.

Even the next hour is too far from my ability to process right now. But I'm also lucky to have a beautiful woman and dog and neighbors who brought me whiskey and friends who check in with me even when I don't have the strength or time to reply right away.

And I'm trying now, tonight, to meditate on that.

Because the alternative, well, it's unfathomable.