Family

My Funk and Me Sitting on the edge of my bed on New Year’s Eve morning, I cannot move myself to even take a shower. The stiffness in my back is all encompassing; I feel like a tightly wrapped mummy, so tight I can barely blink. The cortisone shot in my spine “kinda” worked, I’m not in pain like I was last week. But here I am, better than I was Christmas Eve, but living in a drastically different reality. It has sunk in — Mom is gone, the 18th anniversary of Dad’s death was the 10th of January, and I am left here, in Sag Harbor, in my parents’ summer turned retirement home, 64 years old and Twelderly (the age group prior to the official title of elderly; you know who you are), with a bad back, and the oil bill. And the tax bill. And . . . I am up in my head with no supervision. I realize I haven’t thoroughly mourned the loss of my mother. I began to deeply miss the gentleness of my father and saw myself falling fast. I saw myself becoming breathless, insecure, unfulfilled, and lonely. That despair that I thought was securely sewn up started pulling out the stitches and wiggling itself open. What freed itself is an awful, empty abyss I grew up with, that feeling of being unappreciated, ignored, and insecure. I began to self-diagnose, a dangerous practice even with a clinical social work degree. My first New Year as an “adult orphan,” and my first guest is an emotional black hole that I wanted to fill. Or jump into. I am paralyzed in my own funk. I am falling into the “what have I done with my life” rabbit hole, and it is revealing itself right smack in the middle of the Holiday Bermuda Triangle — Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. There are seasons when the holiday’s triangle, equal in length, becomes an isosceles. (A little geometry for you.) I start on the bottom (Thanksgiving), climb up to the pinnacle (Christmas), then I crash back down to the New Year. I used to pack my funk in a suitcase and put whatever “blues de saison” in my carry-on and head to purgatory. Whether a “stay-cation” or a trip, the triangle’s vortex is always ready to contribute to my full disintegration. Now my baggage has more constructive tools (and toys) since my investment in a social work degree. I have learned to travel through the triangle much lighter since my years of yore. Usually, I can dig out of the crater I create by the New Year. Not this year. As John Lennon lamented, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Thanks, John. In 2018, I had to come out to Sag Harbor to be a dutiful daughter, a highly toxic endeavor, but my last act with my elderly mother; at least so I thought. Being a caregiver is like being tethered to your worst elementary school teacher, while you try your best to be Mother Teresa. On occasions, you wish you could gnaw your leg off to free yourself of the dysfunctional snare. I can still close my eyes and feel the icy chill through my unconscious, the paralyzing stiffness of anxiety, the fiery and electric shock of anger. Then along comes the firehose. The firehose of life that is happening when you are still trying to figure it all out. I thought I could open my mouth, and without swallowing the G-forces’ worth of issues, stigmas, and disappointments, take a sip. (Delusions come in diverse packages.) Oh, how good intentions go south. Or somewhere else. And the trauma did not dissipate April 2nd, 2024, when my mother died. It settled in the reservoirs in my nervous system, like the damn H.I.V. that is chemically suppressed beside it. And I am stuffing it all in that damn hole. And I am eating my funk for dessert. The whipped cream on top are my friends who have their own bubbles and don’t have any emotional room to spare. The cherry on top is my writing block. I just want to “smash the cake,” slam both hands into that pretty little cake of hope. Yes, I am the someone who “left the cake out in the rain.” Go figure. I understand that being cavalier is not the answer. But running around clutching my pearls is definitely not an option. And I do have coping skills. One of my lifelines is my writing, the “in an emergency, break glass” reflex I use, no matter if I am dark chocolate truffle happy, or tablespoons of Hershey’s chocolate syrup sad. But I haven’t been able to break the emergency glass. Even when I do full body slams. I’m exhausted. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not the type of person who lives in the dungeons of my woe, curled up like a hedgehog, declaring victimhood. But at this moment, I am banging on my pots and pans, getting on my soapbox, yelling: “Really?! Stop, dammit! I can’t! I just can’t!” Unfortunately, no one listens to you when you yell. Let alone hears you. And Now, Miss Peggy Lee Recently, when I was sitting in front of my iPad, debating if it was a good time to pull out the “woe is me” machine, I thought of making a playlist of music that reflected my dark, sardonic, hormonal mood. (Oh joy.) I pulled up YouTube to scroll through my list of saved old-school songs, and old-old-school ballads, like Sam Cooke (“A Change Is Gonna Come”), Billie Holiday (“Ain’t Nobody’s Business”), and Judy Collins (“Send In the Clowns”). I then stumbled onto a drop-down of the grande dame of ice-cold cool, Peggy Lee. There was a song I remembered she sang that said it all — that summed up the melancholy I was sitting in, but I could not recall the title. When I typed in the search bar her name, there