...where distraction is the main attraction.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The Storm

After experiencing the loss of someone close to you, what follows is partially about healing, but also largely about learning and adapting.  Healing has a connotation of mending so that one can get back to the life before the injury.  But there is no full return.  After a loss, one learns many things about oneself -- feelings, thoughts, and ideas, but mostly feelings -- he or she would never have otherwise known.  Then after the learning, one takes the experience and merges it with the life going forward.

Some people experience pure grief.  Others postpone it so that they may forget about themselves and help those who suffer.  Some people go back to work in order to maintain some level of equilibrium.  Ultimately we all feel things at different speeds and in different colors.

Three months ago, I posted a short piece called "Awake" announcing on this blog that we were pregnant with our first child.  I have since regretted that post deeply, because I now have to write this follow-up.

We lost the pregnancy and our little boy with it.

It's been a difficult year, probably the most difficult one I've faced in my first three and a half decades.  My health has not been its best.  Our home has been (mostly figuratively) polluted by our neighbors.  My job has become insufferable.  I have spent over 500 hours on the road going to and from work over the past 9 months.  I've seen dozens of drunk drivers swerving all over the freeway first thing in the morning.  I have seen housepets with their eyes torn out and beheaded on a Tuesday, crushed by gardening equipment on a Wednesday, flailing to death after being run over by a truck on Thursday.

It's safe to say that I have retreated from society a bit.  I have gotten even worse at returning emails and calls, for I which I am very sorry because the only lightness I have found is in the people I have met.  From doctor's offices, to operating rooms, to supermarkets, to restaurants, to living rooms, the people in my life are the best part.  And I am thankful for them.

This blog, with all of its whisky posts, has been a welcome distraction.  If it ever becomes too much of a distraction, I will openly address it.  But for now, it allows me to fixate on something I enjoy.  The next two whisky reports (one this week, one next week) will be bittersweet because they were the pregnancy celebratory whiskies.  I will be retiring them from my life with those posts.

I feel very conflicted writing this post.  This blog was originally intended to be about my personal journeys, not just about one particular amber restorative.  Yet the 200+ whisky posts have brought an audience much wider than my local friends and family.  Thus many of you don't actually know me.  And here I am disclosing private things; wounds, scars, and all.  Come for the whisky, stay for the despair?  No, if you're here for the booze, thank you.  Just think of this as a bit of additional perspective to my thoughts on the next two whisky posts.

If you're here just to be here, thank you.  I still intend to post non-whisky things someday soon, but for now, this is all I can focus on.