I keep forgetting stuff to talk to my therapist about, so I’m going to try to write some of it down throughout the week. I had to start seeing a new therapist and I have to explain everything about my life to her (I had been seeing my other therapist for six years so she knew pretty much everything). I’m not used to it.
COVID is hitting my family hard. My grandmother contracted it and died at the beginning of April, which has left me very conflicted. We have barely had a relationship for almost a decade, and I have known for a while that whenever she died I would feel a certain amount of guilt. Now that she is gone, my brother and my cousins keep talking about how loving she was, and I started thinking about why I made the decision to cut her off. I was at my lowest point, about to go into treatment for my eating disorder, and my mother kept telling me all the terrible things my grandma was saying abut my father (they were going through a divorce, and my grandma never liked him). My mom has said for my entire life that my grandma is the reason for all her issues, and I would do anything not to end up like my mom. I think deciding to stop speaking to my grandmother seemed like a way to prevent myself from ending up like my mother, but instead I might’ve missed out on having a relationship with her because I allowed my mom to manipulate me.
I have three other family members with COVID, but thankfully their symptoms have been relatively mild. My cousin, Steve, is severely autistic and I imagine the breathing troubles must be very scary for him. My aunt was the first to get it (at work, presumably), and then she brought it home to him and my uncle, so she is starting to feel better now.
My uncle Pete has been in the hospital for a couple weeks now as well. You can protect yourself from COVID by quarantining, but not from decades of alcoholism. His liver failed, his kidneys are failing, his organs perforated, he had blood poisoning and infections in his bones and joints, and was experiencing paralysis from the neck down...that isn’t even the whole list. He is 55 years old. They were sure he was going to die, but somehow he is still alive. He is driving all the hematologists insane because they are doing dialysis and pumping him full of plasma and his blood is doing the opposite of what blood is supposed to do and they don’t understand why. They were finally able to do surgery yesterday, though, so he seems to be improving.
Something I realized that I do, I guess to preemptively process grief, is start writing eulogies before people even die. I did it with my grandma before she died in January. I’ve started writing Pete’s. I didn’t do it before my grandma died in April because it happened quite fast, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyways. I started writing my dad’s eulogy years ago, and he’s healthier than me. That’s probably something to bring up in therapy...
Well, that was a lot longer than I meant for it to be. Other than all that, my masters program is going great, I hate my job, and I’ve been playing Hunt-A-Killer with my friends on Skype (10/10 would recommend!)
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