EPTAt the mouth of March, my grandmother fell ill and was taken to the hospital - the first of several times this would happen. She wasn't healthy and we, the family, knew her passing was both inevitable and approaching. After falling on rough financial times my late grandfather orchestrated a reverse-mortgage on the house to pay for the property taxes and other such bills. Fast forward four years and the bank nearly owned the house outright. We had until my grandmother's passing to live "comfortably" in the family estate, so any health crisis she went through carried with it a far higher potential for tragedy than solely losing a loved one. I have long felt the crushing weight of a vague and ethereal apocalypse, the arrival of which is impossible to determine until it steals away the place you've called home for your entire life. It is my lack of prescience with regards to what I had perceived as impending doom that had historically caused even the smallest of my grandmother's complications to stress me out for days on end, and though what I would come to call "March Madness" was no exception, this time was peculiar and bears reflection.
It's all a bit of a haze, but this much I know: my grandmother was first hospitalized in the last days of February. Over the next week, she would be carted between two different nursing homes and three different hospitals until she could take no more. A DNR was signed, hospice care scheduled, and she returned home on the week of the 4th of March, with every intent to die in the same bed her spouse had four years ago. It was clear she had given up and just wanted to be around her remaining family, and I certainly couldn't blame her: what she had was hardly a life, no longer able to walk, eat, or use the bathroom without assistance. She fell into a coma on the 8th and died on the 11th. We buried her a few days later. Before my grandmother's body had even left the estate, one of my aunts (whom I do not live with) scheduled an assessment of the properties' worth with every intent to sell the house as soon as possible. As far as I am aware that is still her plan.
Under normal circumstances we would have three months before we had to list the house in the newspapers and allow for open houses. We would still be required to pay the bills, as the reverse-mortgage had stopped paying for those a long time ago, but that period of time was seen as a necessary courtesy given the circumstances. My aunt doesn't particularly care for courtesy, however, as you can probably infer. Thankfully for us it's unlikely she finds a seller anytime soon, as the estate has been rotting away for at least thirty years with no real maintenance, but the prospect of the house being sold sooner rather than later is more than a little nerve-wracking all the same.
There's obvious tragedy implicit in the above information, but I didn't write it to seek sympathy. This extreme situation serves to illustrate the point eluded to by the title of the post, that my positive habits of maintaining a steady output of creative content had become dangerous. I certainly skipped a beat during the heart of the complication, but a few days later everything was back to normal, as if my psyche could not fathom an existence without a consistent flux of product. And truly I am most afraid of losing the ability to produce; as stated before it is what I currently rely on to self-actualize. But I always could have full-stopped my work and spent more time with my ailing grandmother and with the rest of the family who had come to visit, and I opted instead to fall into what was comfortable, because that was the only thing that "felt right" to do. That's something I will now have to live with for the rest of my life, and while it doesn't seem like much of a big deal even as I write this, I have a sneaking suspicion I'll feel differently as time marches on. Anything I created during this critical and tragic time could have been created later - none of it was time-sensitive. But I made my choice and can't take it back. Ironically all I can do now is continue to make content.
I didn't have a concrete idea of what I wanted to write when I sat down but hopefully this winds up being helpful to someone else who might run into a similar situation. I've heard plenty of tales of people who throw themselves into their work to distract from the tragedy around them, but I never thought a smart, introspective guy like me would fall prey to something that seemed so elementary in all the TV dramas. Writing this also forced me to confront the part of me that made that decision, which I believe will help me to improve as a human being going forward. I've taken my health and future seriously in the past year, but never as seriously as now. I guess sometimes you have to fuck up in ways you can never atone for in order to grow.
🤙
