I’ve finally started asking for feedback on my death doula services page. I still need a name for the service, but the more important thing is WHAT IS IT and WHO AM I, basically. If anyone out there would like to review it before publishing, pop a comment below or use my contact page to let me know.
This post is going to be a lot of random shit all jumbled up together, hold on to your butts
I am a proud supporter of Autostraddle, and because I’m a supporter I was able to participate in a weekend-only popup Discord server last weekend; and it was so much fun that a bunch of us were scrambling like hell to make new spaces on Discord where we could continue to hang out. A bunch of queer people, hanging out and sending memes and playing video games and sharing recipes and pictures of pets and, basically, enjoying the safety and expansiveness of a space that we so rarely get.
Since I came out of the woodwork a bit more in order to participate as queerly as possible, I shared one of the pages here on this site. So then I updated some of the sidebar widgets here, to reflect not just games I’m playing and books I’m working on finishing, but also podcasts I listen to regularly.
And THEN, a lovely person emailed me asking about death doula services on behalf of a friend, and I realized that I need to get that page up, and eventually a website, which led me to the first paragraph of this post. (I told you it was a mess in here)
Serious talk, though
People in the southern United States are freezing and have no water service — hundreds of thousands of them — and people are dying.
People here on varying visas with varying immigration status are stuck in no-man’s-land because USCIS is doing what looks like fuck-all with processes that are vitally important to many people, some of them really close and important to me. I’ve emailed my reps and an immigration attorney and I’m honestly just trying to keep my chin up so that I can be here and be present for them when they need it.
People are still dying in huge numbers from COVID-19 and its various new strains, and I don’t know how to hold enough of them in my heart without shattering, so instead I am focusing on who I can help right now — who I can support right now — who I can be here for right now. My heart wants to hold the whole world and my spoons level informs me that I cannot do that. I think I might struggle with this for most, if not all, of my life: that I am only able to do as much as I am able to do, not one bit more.
And also
My sleep patterns are so weird. Days are still blurring together, and even journaling every day, where I write the day and date in several places, is not helping me to hold this information in my currently available RAM. Sometimes I can go to sleep and rest all night, and some nights I can’t go to bed until the fingers of first light begin to draw themselves on the sky. I don’t like it but it feels unavoidable. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but there are many hills to die on and I’m not choosing this one.
This Mercury Gatorade (inside joke lol) has been wacky and frustrating here and there. I’m supposed to have gotten a call from the local county court about my name change after I sent in the requisite paperwork to one of the government offices involved, and three months later I haven’t heard from them so … what now?? I left a voicemail and hopefully it doesn’t fall into a black hole.
Our eighteen-month-old little person is having so much fun getting bigger and stronger and sillier. His squeaks and exclamations and almost-words are amazingly adorable and when he picks up a 2/3 full gallon of water just to see if he can, the look on his face is priceless.
Wherever you are, I hope you have something to hope for
I am relying on the structure of my days and the collective interdependence of my big family for my doses of hope. There are days when all of us feel like shit, except for maybe the toddler, and we’ve all had to feel our way through to believing that it’s okay to feel like shit for a whole day. Or more.
I hope for you what I hope for myself: moments of peace, however fleeting.
Frodo Baggins: I wish the ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
JRR Tolkien / Peter Jackson; Fellowship of the Ring
