I’m feeling much better. This weekend was good (well, not good by most definitions, but semi-restorative or something), and I’m ready, or nearly ready, to get back to things.

The title is (almost obviously) a conscious twist on the cliche that “time heals all wounds”. Some wounds, after all, get worse with time: consider an infected wound. Moreover, plenty of physical wounds (as I know fairly, but not catastrophically, well) leave scars. However, I think it’s reasonable to say that, with time, most wounds get better than they were on the day/week of the wound, even if they don’t get fixed completely.

That’s what I’m experiencing: my grandma’s death will almost certainly leave a scar (I know from experience that all deaths leave scars, and some are more pronounced than others), but my gosh do I feel better than I did.

A funny (“funny”) thing is that I still didn’t feel physically great today. My head hurt, I felt tired. Then I looked at my sleep data: for the past two weeks, I’ve been averaging 6:20 per night, which really doesn’t seem like enough. I actually took a nap today (hence the lateness of this post), and I still don’t feel phenomenal, although I do feel more functional.

As I suspected, it very much was good to see family. And, happily (or something) everyone seemed to be doing alright. My grandpa is old and it certainly shows, but he’s empirically resilient and seemed to be doing well all things considered. The rest of my family (both extended and immediate) seemed, honestly, to be in better shape than me. I think it’s partly because they view death as a one-off event that only really affects old people. I “know better”, and that makes me get really uncomfortable about its relentless accumulation. Deaths were easier before they started to get so close and so frequent and so young. (Recently, people around me have been fortunate to continue on the path to old age, but there was a stretch that was tough for me and so much tougher for some people I knew, and that really activated something different that made deaths rougher. More recently, the relentlessness has served as a bit of training for me and has brought me to accept that it’s just something to accept, so I think I manage it more easily and healthily, but it still feels harder.) My dad’s family also tends to be unemotional – partly, they’re less likely to show emotions, and partly they’re I think just less emotional. For things like this, I guess, it maybe works out well.

Some (perhaps all?) of my cousins had never been to a funeral before! Part of that comes from the culture of my dad’s family: funerals seem to be less of a thing for them. Part of it, though, I think comes from luck.

In any case, I now feel mentally prepared for getting back into things (even though I guess I was kind of physically not there today, which may have been a manifestation of mental exhaustion, too). This is a big change from last week: I wasn’t mentally there at all. Recall that, basically to prevent unhelpful spiralling thoughts (i.e., numb the pain), I’d do 3-ish hours of outside stuff after every work day. Today, I felt ready to think, even if I wasn’t thinking super effectively. I think it’s funny how, instead of turning to some person or substance, I just decided to be outside a lot. Very in character, and it makes me glad that I’ve developed these objectively healthy ways of dealing with things (even if perhaps there’s a “more healthy” way to confront these things and deal with them – but my methods get me through, I feel alright, and I think there’s some value to remembering the pain so that I become a better person with a lot of respect and tolerance for others).

Wow, that’s a lot of deep thoughts for a parenthetical. Anyway, it’s getting late, and I want to make sure I sleep enough (another change from last week!).