What gets to me about the grief is that there are so many aspects of it that I can see coming from a mile away and if I was just capable of changing my behavior – crossing to the other side of the street or just not insisting on having things just so – I could probably avoid this bad moment or the other.
But does the grief win then, if you have to change yourself to avoid it? What’s worse – a moment of remembering or becoming someone entirely different. Which is, of course, assuming that I haven’t become someone entirely different. Then there would probably be the counterargument that we all change every day. The Niels that was here on Sunday is not the same Niels that is here today as I write this, because time and life have moved on and they have left their mark on me. They recognize each other; but they’re not identical.
So, I change, and the grief stays the same and we still run into one another.
Which brings me to my current conflict with my anal-retentive tendencies. Because, at the start of every year, I pull down old file folders from 8-9 years ago and shred the documents, because who needs IKEA bills that are older than 8-9 years old? And before anyone argues that you probably don’t need the newer ones either, I’ll suggest you file your documents your way and I’ll file mine my way: stuff 2-3 years old in the home office with me; stuff 4-8 years old in the attic and everything older (unless we decide it has to be held permanently, which is a whole different story and filing system and, really, it’s time you stopped trying to judge or understand it) goes in the shredder.
And that’s been working fine for me for ages, except for the year I broke the shredder in my zeal.
Except this year’s shredding project is 2016. That means the year Colin first got diagnosed. That means a stack of medical bills and documents an inch thick.
The good news, I suppose, is that we decided to hold on to those a while longer, so there’s less shredding to be done this year. The bad news is that I’ve now got a stack of medical documents to figure out what to do with. I don’t want to leave them out in the open. Not because I have a jump scare every time I see them, just because it doesn’t feel like something I need to have lying here. But I can’t just file them away forever and ever where they’ll never be found again, because that will mean rummaging through old forgotten papers one day and then there will be a jump scare when we find Colin’s first cancer diagnosis. How to hide something so well you don’t see it every day, but not so well that you lose it. I’m still working on it. And I know it’s a stupid problem and, as dead children issues go, a first world one, but it still nags at me.
And it’s at least a problem that feels, I don’t know, civil? Because, I’m also having my rage fits again. And not to get too political, those haven’t hit me as bad since the last time the current president was in the White House. I’m not going to get into whether he’s a good president or not here or politics at all. All I know is that there is one man who seems to get exactly what he wants and successfully avoids multiple legal persecutions. And then there’s another man with a dead son and a broken upstairs toilet and a stack of medical papers and you really start to wonder when fairness was handed out in the universe. I mean, hell, what about Colin? He got five years, one of them fairly miserable, and other get to make billions selling meme coins. You really stop understanding the universe after a while.
So, we’ll focus on the good. Christina had her first post-therapy mammogram and everyone is happy with the results, so that’s good. We finally cashed in a birthday gift I gave her years ago and went to an escape room this weekend – all four of us – and re-enacted an escape from East Germany to the West. Mostly Emma and Christina saved us. I was almost useless until the last moment, when my encyclopedic knowledge of 80s music came in handy for once. We’re taking a little trip as a family this weekend, so we’ll be out of town for Colin’s birthday for a change, but I think it will be good for us. And sometime after I get back, I’ll figure out what to do with these papers.