It’s my life and I’ll do what I want
Something like that… ooooor not… Actually, I was rocking to the old Animals song in the couscous aisle over at the Plum Market today. Whaddya mean, the Plum Market doesn’t have a couscous aisle? I should clarify that I was rocking a bit s-l-o-w-l-y and v-e-r-y spacily.
I had already told the guy at the seafood counter that I was really spacey today. I can use that excuse when I’m making a klutz of myself trying to buy salmon but it wouldn’t have worked all that well with my young banker buddy yesterday.
Anyway, I am spacey and slodgy today because I seem to have finally picked up the viral respiratory disease that the GG brought home last week. Oh, it isn’t really all that bad. I am ambulatory. Actually I am ambulatory enough that I walked over to the Plum Market after work today. I hope this is the worst of it. The GG reported a sort of barfy-feeling stage but that came with a headache and I almost never get headaches even when I’m “sick” so I’m hoping I will skip over that.
I don’t know what it is. Grief and mourning are a different journey for everyone in every situation. I don’t remember ever really feeling sad or sorry for myself after losing my brother and dad within a year*. Somehow I was able to just keep on truckin’. But for a long time I couldn’t listen to music much at all. I’m not totally sure why but I think that I actually started to pay attention to lyrics for the first time in my life and boy oh boy, all the sad songs made me so sad I couldn’t listen to them. So I tuned out and for a long time I lived either in silence or with NPR talk radio rumbling along in the background. Music hurt my ears. And that is really strange, considering that I have a music degree. Or maybe it’s not all that strange…
I think those days are past. I still spend more time listening to NPR rumbling along in the background than music but when I am bumbling along in the couscous aisle and some old song from the Jurassic Age comes on, I start boogying along with my cart, humming quietly along or even singing a bit if I want to. I don’t even care what people think. I think I am making some kind of progress here.
So, here’s a video of The Animals singing the title song in a very weird setting “on US TV in 1965”. Whaddya think of those trophies on the walls? <wink>
* The Commander doesn’t seem to have affected my music listening habits but I am not actively sad about her death. There is guilt and second guessing about some things I wish I had handled better and the feeling of freedom that I am enjoying (yes, really, the last year was horrific for both of us). I do know that I am going through a huge decompression stage right now and not sure what’s next. One step at a time…
April 3rd, 2012 at 7:57 pm
You and the GG did so very much to support your mom with her decisions. That took much energy and love to face the end of life decisions together! But the decisions themselves were Commander’s. I have been thinking of her and all the people who were in hospice in my life. I found this article (excerpt below) from the most recent Prevention magazine helpful to understand the many complexities of end of life care. Seems the Commander had a good death, And in those final weeks many people knew who The Commander was as a person. From my perspective you helped the Commander make it a “thoughtful process.”
http://bit.ly/HXoCjK
“Few would argue against the idea that end-of-life care in America needs an overhaul. Patients typically undergo aggressive treatments for the conditions afflicting them, ending their days in a semiconscious haze of pain and pain-killing drugs; often, no one addresses the fact that they’re dying. In large part, this is because doctors are taught that their primary goal is to fight disease and injury. “Physician training reinforces a denial of dying, death, and grief and emphasizes combating the disease over helping the patient,” Dr. Byock says.
Take pneumonia, he explains. The human body is hardwired with a variety of ways to shut itself down naturally, and pneumonia is one of its least painful exit strategies. It’s also one of the most treatable, so doctors rush in to intervene, and each regimen–antibiotics, ventilators, surgery – forces the body of a critically ill patient to find a more painful way to die.
Dr. Byock wants to make that a more thoughtful process. He believes that for each patient, a loving, frank, and compassionate collective of doctors, family members, and, of course, the patient herself should discuss what her prognosis is, what’s medically possible, and what trade-offs she may want to make between her remaining time and her quality of life.”
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:40 pm
I still have certain songs I can’t listen to because of the lyrics or the sad melody. We all heal in our own ways and on our own time schedule.
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:33 pm
Love those trophies! They creep me out a bit but I still love them.
I’ve heard many people say that after the death of an important person listening to certain kinds of music was hard, or impossible. I guess it’s partly the lyrics but maybe it’s also that music brings out emotions, all kinds of emotions, and if sadness is your dominant emotion because of a death music makes the sadness more intense.
April 8th, 2012 at 4:37 pm
Were those Iverson Snowshoes????
April 8th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
And… on topic: I still cannot play the CDs that The Engineer collected over time, particularly the Jazz CDs that reflect a lot of the music that I have heard him perform with The Jazz Lab Band, Funk and Wagnall’s, Jump Street…. or even those classical tunes that he loved to put on the CD player on Saturday/Sunday mornings to just fill the background with good sounds… to this day, I still remember Valdemort & me sitting in the waiting room of the Ear specialist (I was pregnant with PengoJanetto – just weeks from due date – as we were in the “Val needs ear-tubes” stage, and “Scheherazade” was SOFTLY playing on the speakers, and Val – with a sly smile – turned to me and asked “Is this ‘Tickley Toddle’?” We had played a lot of “Tickley Toddle” as well as “Scheherazade” on those weekend mornings! So, I knew that Val did not have any hearing loss… 🙂