Summer continues to be terrible for me. This is why winter is my favorite.
When I was a kid, summer was terrible. You'd think that a queer kid in the middle of nowhere Nebraska would be fucking glad to get out of the queerphobic hellscape that is a country school, but my home life was similarly shitty, and at least school fed me.
This summer started off with the death of a friend.
I met her nearly a year ago, when I first showed up to an SCA event. A lot of people in the SCA are retirees, and she was no different.
(It wasn't always this way. But we are an aging society, as she would always put it, and there's now a lot less kids and a lot more grey hair.)
She made me feel welcome. She invited me to our barony's choir. She told stories of the barony and kingdom in years past. She told stories of people long gone. She told stories of people still here. She invited me to join her and a group at her house once a month for dinner. She bought me dinner on my birthday. She gave me a standing invitation to drop by whenever. She showed me old movies. She gave me my feast gear after I helped her with her garage sale, and offered to let me buy fabric off of her for half what she would have sold it to anyone else. And she listened, when I talked about my thesis work, for nearly two hours.
She was having symptoms of heart attacks, for months. And she died the night before her cardiologist appointment, because her doctors didn't take it seriously. Because the symptoms of heart attacks are different in women than in men (I would say this differently if I knew exactly what caused it. I would say "people with an estrogen-dominant hormonal system" or whatever, if that was the defining factor. But I don't actually know if HRT affects it, or if it's something else. So please excuse my clunky language, and go memorize the "female heart attack symptoms" even if you are not a woman, or even if you're not AFAB, or even if you think you'll never need it. Because maybe someday you'll make friends with a senior citizen and not even realize that you're slowly watching her heart kill her).
Her will was not finalized. It took weeks for anyone to even publish an obituary, and it was the kind of bland everyman obituary that gets published when the funeral home doesn't know what else to do and the person's got no blood relatives left. There was no funeral. The old will, that she wrote up while I was still knee high to a grasshopper, had an executor that wants nothing to do with the mess that is her estate, and the will she meant to have ready is nowhere to be found. So everything just. Sits.
The only thing she had ready was what to do with her body. She's been cremated, and her ashes have been spread everywhere she wanted them spread. A friend took in her cats, because no one could figure out where they were supposed to go. I got the fabric she set aside for me, even though I hadn't actually paid her for it yet. And everything else simply sits.
It feels like such an anticlimactic end to what was a person brimming with personality. In my family, obituaries are fucking sacred. That's what I keep coming back to. That bland, impersonal obituary.
There's a hole in the barony that everyone is simply moving around and rarely acknowledging. I'm beginning to realize that this barony is full of these holes where people used to be, that everyone is just so used to moving around them that a new one just... adds to the Swiss cheese that used to be our barony. I just came around after they were already gone.
And I had about a week to grieve, and then I got so unbelievably sick.
I had bronchitis again. For three weeks. And then I finally got on antibiotics. I finished those two or three weeks ago, and I'm finally beginning to feel like a person again. It's amazing how un-person-like you feel when you can't fucking breathe. Forget heart or brain, your soul is stored in your fucking lungs.
Which means that now I'm starting to grieve again. Now that I can feel something other than fucking sick. Yesterday was the annual scroll cover making, which means it's been a year, give or take, since the first time I showed up.
Anyway, go get involved in your local clubs and societies. Go get involved in the SCA, if medieval stuff appeals to you (we have fighting, arts and sciences, royalty...). Go find something that's mostly old people, trying to keep skills alive, and bring in your young friends, and make old friends, and learn to keep things going.
In the next decade, we'll probably see a lot of clubs and societies start to fall apart. We already are. You have to go get involved in fun stuff in your area, if you want to keep having fun stuff in your area. People complain about the removal of free public spaces? You have to go be involved, so that there's other people with you when you need to push back against the closing of a library, because that's where your club meets every week, damnit.
It is not enough to simply wish public libraries would stay open because you think they're important for the public. You are the public. Go get involved. It doesn't have to be an activist group. It can be the SCA. It can be a group that helps old people with taxes. It can be a group that trains dogs. Just find one thing in your area that meets regularly, and go.
I have nothing to add. Take Mouse's advice, the next 901 days and every day after that. He's been right so far.
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