Take a guess why I’m back. By now, you’re probably sensing a pattern (and if you’re not, at this point that’s honestly on you).

It’s been around two weeks since my grandpa died. This one was a little different because it was far and away the least sudden. There’s some rap song about a guy living the fast life, and he says, “I live on borrowed time / My expiration date: I passed it” [punctuation my own]. That was my grandpa. He’d gone (good-naturedly and really resiliently) through various life-threatening adventures starting in his 50s and continuing on to the end, but he was super resilient and emerged roughly unscathed from all of them. In the ways that mattered, though, this guy was quite healthy: as far as I can tell, he lived a long and complete life, and he was able to do all the things he loved (enjoying music [both making and listening], going fishing and hunting, playing golf) – and, of course, spend time with my grandma and with the rest of his family and with dogs (there are so many pictures of him with so many generations of dogs).

He was really, really funny in a dry and clever way, and he supported the people he loved in whatever they chose to do.

Since I’m removed from the immediate emotion, this isn’t as overwrought a note as the one I wrote for my grandma. The last two weeks have been incredibly busy, maybe personal-record-breakingly so. I’d had a scheduled block of busy-ness (and my grandpa died in the middle of that), and then I had to catch up with things from the busy-ness, and I did not feel like stopping so I tried to keep going going going, and I did for a while, and then last Friday I kind of seized up and stalled out. I’d let the people around know what was up, which was definitely the right move because then they knew why I screeched to a halt once they saw that I screeched to a halt. The last few days have been a slog, and I haven’t been sleeping (both because of various commitments that prevent sleep and because I don’t feel like sleeping, even though I definitely should be sleeping). The funeral is soon, so even though this seems like a path to disaster, I think I’ll hit a reset this weekend. I’ve told people that I’m going to do absolutely zero work for the next few days. I think that pause will get me back: rested, recovered, ready. As before, I’m not pressuring myself to get things done because that doesn’t work. It’s more like I want to get going again, and next week looks and feels achievable.

If I had to do it again, I’d probably still do the “go hard until I stop” method. Because of the other things I had going on, there were defined things to do, so I opted to do them rather than just doing nothing. I’m good at performing when I know what I should perform, so I did it and I did it quite well (rave reviews!!). Recently, things have switched to the amorphous “Yeah just make some progress on some things” category, so I’ve been working to define tasks for me to do, but they’ve been going slower. Not as slow as in July since I was really fairly braced/ready and since it almost felt like the right outcome given the context, but – as always – I’ve been hit a little more than I’d expected/hoped.

My grandpa was also very patient. He was content to sit with his own books or thoughts or quiet, and he was also happy to go go go and join my grandma on whatever whim she decided to follow that day. (To be clear: my grandma was also very focused, not head in the clouds, but she loved being busy in a way that required her to follow some whims some of the time.) He was the first person in his family to go to college, which was especially impressive since there were some great manufacturing jobs that paid better – but his dad had one of those types of jobs and didn’t like it, and my grandpa saw him come home from work every day and realized he’d much rather do something he loved – and I’m pretty sure his decision set that entire side of my family on the path to education that we’ve all taken. A 100-percent-grad-rate-for-the-people-who-could’ve-graduated is pretty impressive – especially when there were so many secure options that didn’t require graduation.

Another factor could’ve been that the job my grandpa chose and chose to love and loved was teaching.

I’ll miss spending time with my grandpa: talking, fishing, watching cartoons, eating pancakes (his pancakes were great, and now I’m crying about pancakes). Looking at his hats, seeing whatever joke shirt he wore that day (there were so many). But I’ve already been missing spending time with him, which looks rough in writing but actually diminishes the roughness of the current moment. As with many old people, my grandpa used to be able to do more than he could do at the end, and his fade-out was a lot more graceful and a lot more gradual than a lot of people’s. Which was kind of nice for us (at least from my perspective) because it gave time to realize and get ready – and I hope it was nice for him because he got to see us do more things, and he got to live for a long time and play more golf and make more music and see more dogs. He was patient, and he loved my grandma so much (more than I realized, I’m sure), and I think he wanted to be there for her but didn’t really expect to be there after her too (and nobody else expected him to be there after her either), so once she was gone he didn’t see a need for more patience. Putting that type of thinking into writing gets a little sketchy, but when you’re well past 80 and living on borrowed time and in the past year or two you’ve really started showing that you’re living on borrowed time and feeling it, that thinking gets a lot less sketchy.

I’m looking forward to seeing my family soon. It’ll be good to check in with them. I hope they’re doing all right. I think they are. I’d say that, writ large, I’m doing well. Until a few days ago, I thought I was doing quite well. Then I hit a definite roadblock, but I’m optimistic – both from old patterns and from “logic”, which doesn’t count for as much as I’d expect for things like this but has to count for something – that I’ll be doing all right again soon enough. I’ve felt like I’m wobbling the past few days (amped to the max and trying to do something or anything but also not wanting to do anything) but I think the sleepiness has something to do with that. I ran on fumes at the start, and then I used that momentum to keep running, and then it all stopped and I slept a lot and then I got tired of sleeping, so here I am. Re-reading that doesn’t look good, but I honestly feel so much better now than I did at a similar point in July. I was just looking back at those notes, and I forgot how much I was struggling. (Other people were definitely struggling more, and I’ve definitely struggled more, but that contextualizes how I’m feeling now and makes me worry less.) It kind of went through August. Then I had a very solid September, then I’ve been off for the last two weeks but in a sense only the last week, and that brings me to now where I’m precisely here (where?). I know these pauses have to happen, and I take them, but man are they frustrating and why do they always happen to me and I wish I could just keep going (both for selfish reasons and for the more obvious “it would’ve been nice if this hadn’t happened”). It did happen, though, and it was going to happen – quite honestly, it seemed like it had to happen soon – so now I accept it (“That’s life”), and I keep going gently once I’m ready.