Have you ever really thought about how things happen in life?
Sat down and ciphered it all out, and then laid back and stared at what you’ve come up with?
God knows I haven’t, but I’m thinking about it lately. When it rains, it pours. While it seems shallow to equate one to another, two pretty horrible things have happened, or in the case of one, are about to happen. This past weekend,
Mabel August, my father’s mother passed away. This means I now have lost all my remaining grandparents in the span of three months. If you were to count up the cumulative crap that’s happened in that timespan, you’d probably wonder how I was coping.
The answer would be a group of people who I’ve regrettably become dependent on, as well as actually enjoying the company of. My fellow
Americorps are like a damned family at this point. They’ve helped me, whether they know it or not, through all this shit, and now they’re all leaving me. Franklin and Chris will still be in the area, but it’s just not the same. While we’re all relieved to be jettisoning from the program at this point, I hope that everyone else is feeling just as melancholy and bittersweet about it. Also leaving, is a small girl named
Rachel (aka Friendster) is taking off to live in Chicago with her boy. She’s also been great, and it kind of sucks to be knocked back down to where I was at the beginning of the year. Life is life, and I learn that more every day.
It feels shady to equate the loss of a grandparent to the moving away of friends, but in some very real ways, for the last 11 months these people have been my friends. I’ve helped them, they’ve helped me, we’ve bled, sweated, and laughed our asses off together, and we built something fucking amazing. I know that both of my grandmothers would be happy to know that what we accomplished this year will help out so many people.
I haven’t used this area to talk about my personal life much lately, but I thought I’d share. To anyone who hasn’t heard from me much lately, I’m sorry, but I’m just plain bad at keeping shit up sometimes. I’ll do better.
justinª