1631 Agent N10.

Grief makes people do weird things, think weird shit. It’s hard to tell how someone is going to deal with it. I’ve known rational people to lose their shit for moths, or even years. Sometimes they never get things back under control. In my youth I was very troubled by grief, but now I just ball it up inside mostly. My generally grim outlook allows me to function relatively normally. Grim might not be the right word. Realistic maybe. Death is hunting us all and sometimes sneaks up on one of us. It’s a reality we all have to face as best we can. It’s very dangerous to prod at someone who may not have dealt with the issue, or is dealing with it. Over the last few years grief has been so omnipresent that I’m a little numb to it now. The Teen, until very, very, recently was still basically in a constant state of teetering on the edge of grief over her father. And fair enough. In my experience 4 to 5 years is pretty normal grieving time for my family. At least on the maternal side. It’s more like minutes on dad’s side, but they are German by blood so they don’t have, how you say? The feelings? The continual exposure to anything makes you more and more immune. For my part I had already grieved for my Uncle before his actual death. It was pretty easy to see that if something else didn’t get there first the alcohol was going to. In many ways I feel the same way about his son and eldest daughter. They’re young, but were perhaps too long in that sort of environment. We tried, as best we could, to instil our values in the Teen, which her brother casually refers to as “brain washing”. It may be more literally true than he realizes. Her psyche certainly took a long time to clean out even a little. She has a least a tiny bit of ambition beyond being drunk all the time now. That’s about as good as we could have hoped for really. At this point she’s on the cusp of going out on her own. What little we’ve armed her with may not be enough to safely navigate the waters of adulthood, but there’s nothing to be done about that now. Our best was all we had.

My nephew has RSV or something. Like, bad pneumonia, I guess. I didn’t get to meet him last weekend because of it. Everyone is worried, but I’m not really. He’s my sister’s child so he’s as close to invulnerable as a human can be by my estimation. I’m disappointed I didn’t get to see him in person. He’ll be a year old before I get another chance, so that’s sad. It’s good that he’s too little to know his first xmas will be in a hospital. I hope he never has to spend a holiday that way ever again.