Trudge

"If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose."

-Charles Bukowski

Feeling numb this morning, after ending my workday yesterday on a Zoom screen planning my mother's memorial service. Or is it a "celebration of life"? Whatever happened to just having a "funeral"? Is it all just a matter of word choice, or are there substantive differences? They didn't test that on the GOE.

Much of the planning has been left to me, which is sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I can control the duration of the event, the tone (more BCP!), the music (nothing that wasn't written within one lifetime of the birth or death of Charles Wesley, and definitely nothing that could be categorized as "praise music". Bleh). The homily will be brief and focused on how the scripture I picked reflects on my mother's life, and the person she was.

She "was". Sh*t. That hit like a ton of bricks.

On the other hand, I'm pretty overwhelmed between work, family, basic self-care, and the dozens of clients clamoring for action on their cases even as they say how sorry they are for our loss. I guess I could just tell them "no" and check out for a while, but as P points out I'm blessed to be busy as all this processes through my viscera in its own time. My sister has nothing to do except smoke and talk to her cat, and my mother's death has devastated her in a way I can't feel because work serves as a sort of emotional prophylactic.

The practice of law as a spiritual rubber. There's an image for you.

Of course, I've already failed once today, when Slane yowled us awake at 5:58 and, rather than springing out of bed for a circuit through the weight room, I just laid there and watched P sleep as the sky changed from pastel orange to pastel blue over the bay. This inattention to the beat-up 59-year-old meat bag in which I live my life needs to be reversed, lest I end up an invalid like my parents.

Speaking of my corporeal self, I found myself trapped in a conversation yesterday with someone who enjoys conversing a hell of a lot more than I do, when the topic arose of his friend's military service and how it seems to have allowed our heroic veteran to avoid paying property taxes. This other person was apparently an old fighter pilot like me, and had gone and found a doc who'd put him on 100% disability for the aches and pains that come with old age anyway, but could arguably be attributed to all those 9 G bat turns when we were young bucks flying Eagles. With his golden ticket, this Knight of the Air went to the county tax collector and instantly rendered his property completely exempt from taxes for the remainder of his life, by virtue of his status as a disabled veteran. I have a metal plate in my neck as a souvenir of that time. Why don't I do the same thing?

Well, because there's something basically repellant to me associated with leveraging the scars of what was, after all, volunteer service, in an attempt to obtain goodies from some bureaucrat. I can still work. My neck hurts sometimes, and there are days when I lose the tip of my index finger and that crescent between index finger and thumb because of whatever's going on in my fused disk spaces. But I can work, run several miles at a time, roll in the hay every now and then, fly a plane, drive a car. The list goes on. I'm not disabled, not even close. It's not worth a couple grand a year to pretend otherwise.

First call is in twelve minutes, and the last meeting is at four. Lunch with an old buddy will break up the day, and supper with P and a dear friend who lost her husband a couple months ago will end the day. With yesterday more or less a bust because of funeral planning, I need to jump on this pile of work in my in-basket.

*photo taken in the parking lot of the Kings Head British Pub in St. Augustine, 8.6.23.