I have come face to face with yet another defining moment in my life.
I know it’s been some time since I updated. Many things have happened within the last 6 years.
To put it briefly – I was right. Being poor was the #1 cause of all my issues.
Things that have changed
1. I managed to get that web designer job I posted about in 2021, and it was the biggest opportunity of my career. I took that opportunity, learned everything I could, became indispensable, and became an expert.
2. I also battled burnout multiple times until I found balance in 2025.
3. My husband and I are still married – just celebrated 19 years together. He has grown a lot within the last 6 years, emotionally and as a person. A lot of the issues I struggled with in my marriage over the years have resolved and have not been issues since we moved away and gained stable careers and social circles.
4. We opened our marriage and now have a third person for 3 years now. She is an incredible addition to our life and fills a hole we didn’t know how to name.
5. We bought a house 3 years ago. It’s pretty much what my entire life goal culminated in. Since then, between buying the house and having a good career, I’ve been struggling with where do I go from here? I’m still working that out.
6. We lost our 14-year-old dog to cancer. We gained 3 new dogs.
7. I forever lost my ability to have children and have had to come to terms that motherhood will not happen for me.
8. I finally got medicated for my bipolar with a drug that works, and I’m 4 years stable.
All of these things I could make their own posts about, and maybe I will in the future. For now, I wanted to give an overview before I jump into what has brought me back to this writing.
I’m currently on a plane heading home to Oklahoma City after flying in to WV for my grandfather’s funeral.
My grandmother passed in 2021, FYI. I know I wrote about my feelings on that back in 2017. Since her passing, my grandfather pushed on for another year, but eventually he was forced to stop. He started suffering from dementia. My brother, uncle, and father have had to watch his slow decline over the last 4 years. While I was building a better life, they were watching the foundation – the patriarch – of our family slowly forget who he was, who they were, where he was. I know it’s been hard on all of them.
I have this thought that because I was not there, I for some reason don’t have the right to mourn this man. I know that’s a silly thought. Grief affects us all differently. As the oldest granddaughter, our relationship was different than all the others. I can accept that he’s no longer with us, and as an atheist, I don’t have the comfort of an afterlife. Which in times like these sucks real hard, but I am a realist, and I know we’re just an amalgamation of electrical impulses in a biological construct; eventually the construct and electrical system fails and we’re no more. It’s kind of morbid, kind of uncouth to view it this way, but I don’t need the comfort of an afterlife to know that living is what really matters. How a person lived, what they did, what impact they left.
That’s where I’m going with this – his impact & the life he led.
He was the defining person from whom my father’s and my own work ethic came. I grew up watching him get off work from his job at the railroad and go to his second job of barbering. 6 days a week for 40 years. A second job he did because he wanted to – it was his own shop. And then he also ran his farm, helped our neighbors, and in his later years, found religion and attended church almost daily. He did not stop. Between my grandparents, they managed to raise 2 sons and then took in my older brother and raised him. There are so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren now, it’s hard to keep count.
This man is the man whose name I bore until I was married. The name I still contemplate returning to – but that’s a different story for a different time. This man’s ancestors are my ancestors. They are the ones who fled Scotland in the 1570s to come to America. They were the ones who ventured west and settled a large portion of West Virginia.
I know I’m going round and round on some tangents, but bear with me. All I am saying is he was the foundation of our family. He is also one of the foundations of my personality. He was also one of the safe adults from my childhood. There are lots of memories in my head about following him around. He actually bought me a pony – ok, it was a horse. Not many granddaughters can say that. He was the only person I allowed in the hospital with me when I tried to commit suicide as a teenager. As I said, he was safe.
The most recent memory I have of him is one I knew when we were making it that it would be special. The day before I left to move to Oklahoma, he and I put together my niece’s playset in the front yard. Nothing crazy, no big fancy memories. Just us figuring out that we should probably read the instructions first.
A big takeaway from this week is that this is hard, and it will only get harder. Grief takes time and many forms. And this death has hit me hard and has shaken some of my sense of self. What do you do when one of the pillars of who you are is no longer there?
