There comes a point where you no longer know what’s normal. You spend your days pushing through life, taking the kids to sports and picking up shopping, but also planning that, should the opportunity ever present itself and you’re at the pearly gates, that you’ll happily hold up the line for half an eternity until someone can explain to your satisfaction why it was necessary for a 5-year-old to get a tumor in the back of his neck.
It all ebbs and flow. I never know when it’s going to come and get me.
So, I’m at work last week, and it’s a lot. There. are. so. many. numbers. And it’s not as if I’m bad with numbers. As journalists go, I can put numbers together in the right order more often than not, which is a pretty big deal in my profession. But moving to energy reporting, it’s such a step change. It’s forever checking to see whether the figure is net growth or gross growth and, if it’s a German number, if it’s 15.2 or 15,200, because they use commas and decimal points differently than we do in English. It’s trying to understand what factors are relevant and whether I’m comparing a closing price to the real closing price or the tab on the website that says it’s the closing price, but really isn’t.
Like, it’s not that I really think that me biffing a number is going to collapse the world economy. But there’s a tiny, tiny chance that a good on my end could do something just like that. It’s a bit daunting.
So, a week ago, I started feeling really crummy at work. Running to the bathroom every 30 minutes bad.
To me, this was normal. I had a miserable experience at Dow Jones 15 years ago trying to make sense of bond markets (here’s a spoiler: they don’t and they never will) and spent most of my time there in an advanced state of panic. So, when I was tasked with sorting out energy markets and began feeling sick to my stomach, my go-to was “Yes, I’m having a panic attack.”
I spent large parts of Wednesday and Thursday, as my entire gastrointestinal system progressed further into meltdown, convinced that I was having the jitters. And I was so mad at myself, because I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to let this happen. The people at this new job should receive a photo caption under the dictionary definition of ‘nice,’ so I couldn’t figure out what I was so nervous about. But I knew I get the jitters around numbers, so it made sense.
But I still wasn’t having it. So many times on Wednesday and Thursday, I shut the world out and told myself “You watched your son die. This is nothing.” Like, having experienced my son dying should somehow make any other terror seem manageable? Plague? Nuclear annihilation. Marjory Taylor-Greene? I should be able to walk off any of those after having watched my son die.
And yet I kept feeling ill. I didn’t understand. How could I convince my metabolism that we’ve already done the worst? How could I make my gut understand that, if I didn’t throw up every 10 minutes in the hospice, how there was no call for it now when I just had to figure out which price has the market worked up on this particular day?
It’s such a strange go-to. I think “I feel bad,” and my brain goes “This is nothing compared to the summer of 2019.” Like, I’m no longer allowed to feel miserable, because I spent THAT summer initially dealing with anti-psychotics and then dealing with not being able to getting out of bed, to losing about 25 pounds to coming to terms with my son’s death, so I could then feel bad about how much of a relief it was when he no longer had to be aware of the hell he was suffering. Can I go through the rest of my life looking at any challenge and thinking “Well, that’s not as bad as watching Colin die?” Is that even normal.
The kicker is that I got home on Thursday and kept feeling bad. And slowly it got through my head that I was home and still feeling terrible. Normally, when I’m nervous, the worst of it at least passes when I get to the safety of my house. Not this time. Also, it dawned on me that, while my stomach was a mess, I was still eating. Usually the appetite is the first to dry up when I’m panicking (note the 25 pounds lost in 2019). And then it dawned on me that I was actually sick. In hindsight, probably with food poisoning. And I had been so focused on making sure that I didn’t let myself be crippled by Colin’s death to allow myself to just break down and go to bed, which is what I then did for the next three days, to Murphy’s dismay.
I’m never going to be done with this. I probably should never be. But I have to find a way to live a life that’s no longer ruled by the memory of my son’s death. I need to celebrate the fun he had. The joy he gave us. Instead, I keep allowing the cancer to shut me down at the drop of a hat.
That’s why I’m going to have a lot of things to say at the pearly gates. That’s why it’s never going to be normal again.
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