In telling you this first part, it is hard to imagine I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, or perhaps I am telling you the story of yourself even. These days anyway.

Then capitol mob insurgency* really got to me. Watching graphic footage of violence after so recently having experienced violence in my family was traumatizing in a way I hadn’t accounted for. In a way that, after the rest of 2020 I felt almost casual Of Course This Would Happen sense of impending doom. So it wasn’t until afterwards it started echoing about in me, how much worse I felt.

If I’d had the foresight to put two and two together (hey, dumbass, don’t watch people get killed if you’ve just spent a couple months imagining what it was like during those last few minutes for Victim!) I would definitely have turned the television off, meekly letting whoever revokes your Current American Pass come and take mine and shake their head sadly that I was too bubbled in my privilege bubble to manage witnessing events unfold. Whatever. I should’ve noped out.

Since then, a couple physical ailments that have twanged about in my body took on full HEY ANNE LET’S GO VICTORIAN ERA FUNNELING YOUR UNPROCESSED GRIEF INTO PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS status.

OF COURSE I finally accepted wild pain was not going away on its own by Friday afternoon, which is my signature move: Pain becomes unbearable in sync with the closing of all regular doctors’ offices, finds level just below threshold for ER visit, enjoy your fucking weekend, Anne.

Anyway, I made the adult decision Friday night to take a pain killer squirreled away from an old surgery.

In the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth for bed, it struck me how beautiful I looked.

At first I assumed it was the drugs, you know?

But then I realized it WAS the drugs. As in, all the worry wrinkles in my face had been forced to relax. Quite shocking to realize I was wearing a year of stress on my face, on purpose, all these micro tensions wrinkling my skin while I surface felt fine. I’d been fantasizing about Botox recently, and it was quite amazing to realize all the little things I didn’t like about my face were only there due to tiny muscles in my face constantly working to hold those wrinkles there. Not permanent! And yet, there, every day.

I went to bed, and the same kind of thing: my thoughts would go like they always go these days. Not: Fear! Disaster! Trauma! But just like processing the events of that day.

I could feel my body try to tense up with each thought, and because of the pain killer, not be able to follow through. It was an amazement to realize I go to sleep not just clenching my jaw, but making fists, body curled like I’m protecting myself from a beating.

It left me stumped. After a year, I’m not sure I remember how to be relaxed. I thought I was taking pains to take care of myself. I do meditation podcasts every day. I take warm showers. I exercise. What more can I do? I thought of going to get a massage, even called to see if here in California, they are doing some outdoor tent massage or something. Turns out, my massage therapist has Covid.

*I remember when 9/11 happened and I had to document what was going on at the time, and there was no snappy title to encompass the horror of that day, and my notes had all kinds of things like ‘Pentagon Attack+World Trade Center Flying Thing’ so that when someone finally called it 9/11, I was like, omgiod, YES. THANKS. Anyway, clearly still floundering for the snappy title for this event.

Haunted House Update

*Homicide Adjacent

Anyway, I had a epiphany about sensing Victim’s ghost that’s been helpful. I’m not sure I can explain it, but here goes:

Victim’s ghost went away when we started talking about our fond memories of them. Which sounds like the stereotypical Hollywood ending to a ghost story right? But it was harder to talk about Victim in this way than it might seem. Because in order to say nice things about a scary entity, you must go through all the steps of accepting they are dead to get back to the place where you remember what they were like alive.

Or at least I did.

I’d assumed a ghost would haunt a place because they had something more that needed to be said, some mystery they needed the living to solve, or at least acknowledge. A Sixth Sense style journey in which a ghost might be terrifying, but only until you understood the message.

I didn’t have time for bullshit after-death games.

I was too fully busy trying to integrate the facts of their death. The minutia of the police report, the 911 call, the late-night guessing games about the nature of the crime itself.

Don’t get me wrong. Thinking on these things was horrible. But it was also all I could think about. I could not turn my mind to anything but the barest sketch of Victim before the day they died. Strangely, it was more painful to think about Victim as someone I knew, who had opinions and strange little quirks and hobbies. Much easier to focus on the trauma, and in doing so, fully teach myself that person was gone.

For example, since Victim’s death, their house has been ransacked, their car stolen, credit cards used. Their jewelry did not return from the morgue. But because I’ve spent so much time imagining Victim’s death, I feel somewhat comfortable in the numb place of: Victim is dead, they don’t need any of those things where they are now.

I explain it to myself as a Nature Channel distance? This is the circle of life.

Scavengers will strip a carcass of all it’s worldly value, and that’s OK in the same brutal but circular way a whale carcass descends to the ocean floor and a million little bugs that will never see the light of day get to feast for a year. Someone probably needed the money/freedom available in Victim’s possessions, and on some level, better for the living who need it to make use rather than let it decay simply because they belong to a dead person.

Whoa, that took a tangent. But circling back to Victim’s ghost: Because my thoughts about Victim were focused on the most terrifying aspects of their life, it was also terrifying to imagine their after-life presence. They seemed ghoulish to me, enraged in mirror to how I was enraged on their behalf.

But whatever mystery they wanted resolved or last-minute life-lesson they wanted to impart? Fuuuuuuuck no thank you. My plate was quite full, thanks.

As the physical and psychological horror of what had happened to Victim got integrated into me, what I was left with were the things I liked about Victim. The kindess Victim had put into the world.

And of course, it’s in facing those memories that you realize what you’ve lost, and who you’ve lost. Not a horrifying spirit, but a family member. And that is infinitely more difficult to deal with.

I think now that the things I sensed were a projection of my own fear, something similar to a hallucination brought on by stress. It’s difficult to explain, but maybe part of me made Victim’s ghost terrifying so I could push those thoughts of Victim away, like my psyche knew I wasn’t ready to face who and what I’d actually lost. I was overwhelmed so I made Victim into something overwhelming. And by being scared to face that ghost, I had a reasonable explanation for not letting my attention turn to actual grief.

And strangely, when I was able to miss Victim? That’s when they left for good.