I’m shell-shocked. With the death of my dear friend, Gay Luce, I finally took in the enormity of what I’ve dealt with in the last 2-1/2 years and realized how gobsmacked I am. The upside is also seeing how well the many years of spiritual delving, meditation, yoga, etc. have served me. The other is seeing how, subtly, I fight a regular battle between my desire to just sit back and absorb and the societal message of “go, go, go”.

It’s odd to find myself in that battle because long issues with my health have put me pretty far outside the norm of constant doing and I’ve learned to make peace with that and accept, even enjoy, living life on a different path. Wow, these societal beliefs hold on deep in our beings!

As several friends kept asking me how I was doing and mentioned how much I’ve been through, I finally took stock:

• January 2020. Mom fell and broke her hip. First hospital fails to diagnose and sends home on broken hip. Next day second hospital correctly diagnoses. During weeks in hospital bad chair sets off old hip issue for me
• Early April 2020. Mom finally gets home from rehab and we hit Covid lockdown
• May 2020. I realize Dad really needs me to figure something out for him but… Covid lockdown. Start calling him every day and organizing Covid supplies from afar
• July 2020. Dad died
• November 2020. Dear friend Pat died
• 2020 way into 2021. All kinds of problems with Dad’s estate and a new judge’s misinterpretation of a common legal phrase in will, including I have 2 cousins who are now dead to me…
• 2021 and 2022. Five more friends died
• February 2022. Mom fell and broke her leg. Having finally calmed down the hip issue, bad hospital chairs set it off again and I also developed a rash. Hip issue combined with remnants of psoas injury to lock the whole area up.
• May 31 2022. Mom had been home a little more than a month when she started throwing up blood and we found out she had an inoperable issue that would inevitably be fatal.
• June 2022. Mom died.
• June-September 2022. Mom’s house was on a reverse mortgage and I’d been told I’d have 3 months to get out. So began a mad dash to clear her hoarder stuff enough to separate out my belongings and organize for movers. All the furniture moving and box hauling threw whole hip/low back area out even more
• September 2022. I moved to the condo I inherited from my Dad in Florida. Good news is I’d known the place since 1980, bad news I don’t really know the area or anyone else
• September 2022. Tried to get driver’s license, couldn’t pass eye test, found out I needed to have cataract surgery.
• October 2022. Mad dash to clear Dad’s stuff and get my stuff in sends hip/back into incessant, immobilizing pain
• November 2022. At doctor visit to get referral for eye surgery, also dealt with the rash I developed while Mom in hospital in Feb, which became ongoing issue, many treatment trials, dermatologist visits and still not resolved
• January and February 2023. 2 cataract surgeries
• February 2023. Find out my friend Gay is in bad shape & start organizing a 9 Gates community help/service group and schedule.
• March 2023. While moving chair throw back and hip all the way out again. Left the chair right where it was and all efforts to continue clearing Dad’s stuff and finish unpacking mine stopped.
• Eye surgeries changed me from lifetime of near-sighted to far-sighted so now have to wear glasses for the many hours I spend reading and writing. The shift gave me headaches.
• Can’t afford the copay for physical therapy so am working my way through a bunch of PT exercises posted on YouTube from chiropractor which are helping but because muscles are in such bad shape, also very painful work.
• June 2023. Gay died.

Looking at the whole list makes my head spin. And yet, even though many days I long to just hang out reading and watching TV and taking naps, most days with no doc appointment I push to grocery shop or cook something or clean something.

Between the friends who noted how much I’ve faced and my own explorations lately of our society’s built-in beliefs about work and wealth and poverty, it finally hit me that, even though I mostly live outside those norms, in little ways I still operate out of “must do” assumptions.

People around here keep asking if I’ve finished clearing and setting up. I keep telling them no, I just stopped and left everything sitting around as it was and that I actually kind of like that it’s my space, in which only my wishes count, and I find I don’t care if part of it is still a mess of boxes and Dad stuff. Could just be me, but I always feel a little wave of disapproval. Oddly, on that one I just don’t feel pushed. Not gonna do it until my hips and back can tolerate it. That’s final!!!

Some amount of cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking fall into the “must” category, at least for me, but even with those I find myself realizing more could slide than I sometimes allow and I often feel burdened by the perceived need to accomplish those things.

Even more, I find I am often haunted by a sense of failure or lack of accomplishment if I had a list of things I thought I should do and get to the end of the day without doing any of them. And a sense of guilt when pain or exhaustion leave me just unable to do anything arises sometimes.

Because of the years of health issues, I’ve tended to operate at a pretty low level and have often had older friends who accomplish more by lunchtime on an average day than I do in a couple. It’s another thing with which I’ve largely made peace over the years of a life outside the norm. Yet those “musts” and “shoulds” still influence my life and decisions about how to spend my days.

For most of my journey I’ve been looking inward at issues that were by and large personal. When I released them, worked through them, etc. they were gone and other people didn’t really influence the process. I’m finding it really interesting to be looking at the issues built into the culture. Because so many people believe in societal assumptions like the need to work all the time, it makes releasing the assumption more complex. I find I vacillate between the space on my own in which I’ve let go and the space where the cultural consciousness keeps intruding.

I’m pulling for a personal and societal revolution of rest in which we let go of grind culture and forge a new path.