Perseverance

I hear people complain about the restrictions and mandates and so forth in a pandemic. And I think they ought to be grateful they're alive and that others are trying to help keep them that way. I try not to judge, but if the last six or so years have taught me one thing, it's perseverance. How to keep on keeping on. And how to Just Keep Swimming.

This is not to say that I'm a totally together person, because I'm not. Nor am I a hoopy frood who really knows where my towel is. And I am definitely not that mag or iced. I grok very little in this farking world, but I recognize shiny when I see it; I'm not a total smeghead. Or a petaQ'. And tanjit anyway, this is a post about perseverance, so I'll stop with the silliness now, before the walls fall at Shaka.

Having laced an entire paragraph with futuristic slang that my late husband either loved or would have loved had he lived long enough to encounter it, let's be serious for a minute.

I don't mean to imply that merely living through grief and trauma is a huge deal, in spite of this being for a Real Authentic Me challenge that I write this piece.

It's not big in any sort of cosmic or even planetary sense, but it is authentically me.

It started with my husband losing weight.

A lot of it, and really fast. But he had been diagnosed with diabetes and gone on some sort of low-carb diet. So we didn't think much of the weight loss aside from hey, if you're pleased with this, congratulations.

And then he turned fifty, went in for a colonoscopy (as one does), and five minutes later was having what he called 'the USB port' implanted in his chest to deliver chemo and other drugs as needed, to draw blood from, etc.

(No, of course it wasn't five minutes. But it sure seemed like almost no time at all had passed at that point.)

Anyway, ten months of chemo treatments, and then he was gone. You see it coming, but you just stand there with your jaw dropped and wait. At least that's how it was for me.

In any case, there was all that, and then there was political awfulness (he died in August of 2016) that I barely saw because I was in shock.

Any of you readers who saw what went down later that autumn in the Disunited States of America know what came next.

In late 2017 I was fired from my job for "work avoidance" because honestly, I should not have been working with the public at all after Laston's death. I really struggled with sympathizing with people whose biggest concern was their data speed when my husband had just died, the 2017 hurricane season was godawful and the Napa Valley was burning down. A great Halloween costume was insufficient to cheer me up, and so I was less polite than I could have been.

Getting fired was a blessing in disguise, because a) I met my late husband when we both worked there (not together, just for the same company) so it was a sad place for me to be, and b) I discovered that I am much happier when I'm not doing customer care for SuperCorp, Inc.

But it took nine months to get another job, except for little freelance writing work. Good thing the kids had social security survivor's benefits.

And then Covid happened and I wasn't working again.

All this mess above of self-deprecating humor and pettiness? It means I'm not particularly special; I'm just me.

I mean, my husband died, I lost my job, there was a worldwide pandemic that a good third of the people on the planet believe is a hoax. But except for the first of these things, I imagine most people had similar last five or six years. I just learned to cope. What else would I do?

People use words like 'strong' and 'resilient' to describe me, and I'm always surprised by that.

I didn't do anything.

I just kept swimming.