I Just Got Used to the Witches

Big picture, making the decision to keep or sell my dad’s Badger football season tickets after he died shouldn’t have been a big deal.

Yet, navigating grief is a lot like that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin’s character says he doesn’t need anyone or anything.

My dad’s Badgers seats are a lot like that lamp (see video above… watch it… it’s the best scene in the whole movie so it’s like you watched the whole movie).

My dad inherited these seats from one of his clients after his client died. This was no big thing as back then the Badgers never won a game and you couldn’t pay someone to go watch them play.

Yet, my parents used the games as it was something fun to do on a Saturday: have a few drinks and then go soak up the sun and watch the home team lose, over and over.

But then in the 1990s the Badgers started to win and the seats became more valuable aka more $$$$$$$$.

Prices went up and things became more complex as they do. So, after my dad died and I was sorting through the logistics+++ and accidentally found the paperwork for these tickets and how – naturally – the payment deadline was looming as it was clear my dad hadn’t paid for them as he was busy dying from cancer, I found myself experiencing one of those emotional/why is this even emotional?! decisions about whether or not to scrounge up the $$$$$ money and keep the damned seats or not and…

And, after a talk with my dad’s best friend… I kept the tickets.

And they’ve been a motherflipping boatload of stress every year since.

I even had trouble using the tickets after my dad’s death as the whole flipping football stadium had become “Too Much/Too Sad” so I didn’t go to games.

When other people went to the game after pre-game tailgating, I instead went to watch the game on a TV at a nearby bar.

But then the seats became even more sentimental as “the Badgers” worked with me to get my cancer-ridden cousin Nick and his family on the field and the team signed a bunch of stuff for my cousin and… then my cousin and his wife had excellent seats.

I then again felt really good about keeping my dad’s seats.

But then COVID hit and there was miscommunication and I started to feel the Badgers Athletic Office was a well-oiled money-obsessed corporate entity 

which meant I was going to give up the seats. They just didn’t seem worth it anymore.

But THEN a Senior Development Director in the Athletic Department contacted me out of nowhere after reviewing my case and then made me a deal which worked for all of us.

So I decided to also keep the tickets in 2020.

Again, it seemed a small thing in the larger scheme but to lose my dad’s seats at that time… well, there is “letting go” and there is “I needed to keep that/those for more time/maybe forever” and the seats were in the latter category.

Until this year. For the first time since age 28, I feel like the life I had idealized as a teenager (a teenager – who at the time was a medical case for neurologists who couldn’t figure out why I suddenly had a violent case of epilepsy and a teenager who was later hospitalized for anorexia and who still somehow maintained a serious goal-ridden future life plan)

is still somehow possible.

Against all odds.

Furthermore, a part of this Things Are Better story, I also recently started a small daily dose of Zoloft because I have a new GP who diagnosed me with PTSD

FINALLY

as Zoloft has apparently been cleared to treat PTSD symptoms.

And this new treatment has stopped the other kind of shaking which I’ve had since my cousin Nicky died in 2016 and which had been really difficult to effectively mask over these past seven years.

Less trembling, no seizures and I also recently skirted a cancer scare.

I’ve also left the field of case management to become a pension-holding, IRA Roth possessing, PhD-flaunting Milwaukee County worker who provides resources and options to children and young people (and their families) when they need more help due to mental health, a disability, AODA issues, criminal acts and other realities that can push people away from their light source.

Aka there is a chance I may be able to apply my doctorate in real life.

#nerdgoal

ALSO our Madison house which was our first house…

…and also where my mom later died and which was at the same time very haunted by all the other people who had died there before AND which was featured in the little book I wrote

is now being sold by the people we sold the house to.

And for a lot more money.

Apparently, I was still listed as this house’s owner on Zillow so I was alerted as soon as it hit the market.

Which then caused me to look at that house for the first time and see all the work we put into it.

And remember all that happened in that house.

This also resurrected my book – The Bank Doesn’t Care If Your House Is Haunted – as, yesterday, due to a close friend sharing her struggles with caring for her mother right now during a health scare, I logged onto my old PC to dig up my other book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weird at Parties at her request.

I started to write again because no one would hire me for any job after my family died so I had a lot of time in between all the rejections.

It was either start a blog or go dig a hole.

In any case, it feels like I’m turning a corner.

The house, the deaths, the grief, the trauma, the writing, the employment and financial security hunt, epilepsy, being a medical guinea pig, Halloween, the blogging, the hauntings, the dogs… it’s all being tied together for the first time in years.

There is less “going through the motions”.

Because it is starting to feel like all that faking it had paid off.

Life is starting to feel real again.

Just in time for the human world to end.

Therefore, this is the year I’ve given my Badger season tickets to my cousin. No more going to games like my parents had.

Also, as another sign of the times, on this very morning, our severely traumatized dog June Carter Cash’s tail started to curl.

FOR THE FIRST TIME.

Like her housemate’s tail.

Now we have two ridiculous dogs with these tails.

But, if that’s how June’s tail is supposed to be… then that’s quite a show of healing progress.

So she is blossoming for the first time while I am resurrecting for the most real time.

So everyone is doing well for the first time in a long time.

WE EVEN WENT CAMPING FOR THE FIRST TIME AS A FAMILY.

It’s also Halloween time once again.

And I inflated these witches a few weeks ago as it was too hot to put them outside and now I’ve become attached to their indoor presence.

The house will feel more empty without the witches.

But life goes on.

I’ll get the witches outside like I’m supposed to.

Saying that, I never did put away the insanely sentimental Christmas dolls which I had found when clearing out my parents’ house after my dad died.

I’ve talked about their potential for being haunted so much I now just let them be comfortable with a view all the time.

I didn’t say I was All Better. But more to come!

Happy Halloween, everyone!