Tag Archives: death is part of life

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Playlist: Stages of Grief 3

Stages of Grief Playlist 3

All women all the time today. Grieving for their men or our culture. Fighting back.

Denial

Dolly Parton: The Grass is Blue

Bargaining

Ann Peebles: I can’t stand the rain

Anger

Lily Allen: Not Fair

Acting Out/Fighting Back

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Give Your Hands to Struggle

Revenge

Dolly Parton: Silver Dagger

Grief

Tricia Walker: The Heart of Dixie

Acceptance

Bessie Smith: You been a good old wagon

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don’t kill your clients

I wrote this in 2016, when at least nine people died of overdoses in Vancouver, BC at Christmas, from fentanyl. I knew fentanyl was hitting my corner of the Washington State too. Warning, this contains a lot of swearing (edited so this does not become a “mature” site). I was in a very bad mood when I wrote it. It is meant to be black humor, to help me deal with grief.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fentanyl-crisis-up-to-9-drug-overdose-deaths-in-vancouver-last-night-1.3900437

But the news today is STILL talking about fentanyl and overdose: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/us/west-point-cadets-overdose-fentanyl/index.html. When will we ever learn? And also, drug dealers are not actually trustworthy…. your cocaine might contain fentanyl. Don’t do it.

don’t kill your clients

oh, you think I’m talking to physicians….

….no, I’m talking to my fellow dealers.

See, heroin is rather labor intensive to produce, being from the opium poppy and all that. (When people say “I only take natural supplements.” I want to say, “You mean like opium and heroin? You know, plant based.”) Also, Afganistan, those fungkers shoot you as soon as look at you. It turns out that fentanyl is cheaper to make and you can source the ingredients from China.

And then, you can make fake oxycodone tabs and fake hydrocondone pills and sell them for bitcoin on the silk road. But you know, ya gotta mix the sheet right. If you mix it wrong and a buncha people overdose and die, there are complaints. Ya might get some scared clients, like, junkie friends of junkies. And then there are also those chronic pain people who aren’t junkies but been forced onto the streets to treat they habit, I mean, pain. We got a good thing going, the pill thing, because the junkies think that pills is safer than heroin. You might scare the fungkers and then how the fungk will I be able to buy that island with my bitcoin?

So dealers, ya’ll fungkheads, ya messing it up if you don’t get the goddarn mix right. See, fentanyl is not routinely tested for on the blood and urine drug screens. So the person gets labelled as an oxycodone overdose and no one knows that it’s fake pills. But when there are too many deaths, the goddarn feds and doctors get suspicious and start testing the pills.

Same with heroin. Cheapens things to cut it with fentenyl. But you gotta calculate right, because if you kill a whole bunch of clients at once, 1. you cut into profits 2. you make the cops and docs suspicious. You gonna ruin it for everyone, you goddarn morons.

And now I hear we got a new mix. Carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer. Read the recipes carefully, morons, it’s 10,000 times as strong as morphine, you gotta dilute the sheet 10,000 times. Don’t you know math? Take a goddarn chemistry course.

Don’t fungk things up for the responsible drug dealers. A live client keeps on paying.

Be careful out there.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/dec/11/pills-that-kill-why-are-thousands-dying-from-fentanyl-abuse-http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/24/health/elephant-tranquilizer-carfentanil-heroin/

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Time marching

This is a tintype. “Tintype photography was invented in France in the 1850s by a man named Adolphe-Alexandre Martin. Tintypes saw the rise and fall of the American Civil War, and have persisted through the 20th century and into modern times.” — from here.

I do not know who this young man is, nor the year. I asked my maternal uncle before he died and he denied any knowledge of the person. He was the family historian and archivisit.

However, I have four tintypes in the box of china doll furniture clothes and accessories. My sister and I received a box of jewelry and the tintypes from my Great Aunt Esther Parr. She was my maternal grandmother’s sister and married Russel Parr. Her maiden name was White, a daughter of George White, the Congregationalist Minister who ran Anatolia College in Turkey and then moved to Greece. My sister and I divided the box of jewelry and the tintypes. There were eight so we took turns picking. We used them for dollhouse portraits, not realizing that they were real photographs. I wonder if the tintypes are from the Parr side of the family.

Last month I was missing my father on February 12. I was a month off. His birthday was today, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, born in 1938. I miss him now, too.

I will label more photographs, since I appear to have inherited the maternal family paper archive. There are people that I don’t know, though, and my parents are gone. My mother’s siblings have died as well. I am so glad I still have my father’s sisters.

Ask your parents about the pictures and the objects they keep, before they are gone and you lose the story. Time marches on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: March.

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Stages of Grief Playlist 2

Wait, another? We don’t go through the stages of grief once. We go around and around, like a spiral. Some days we want to lie down in the driveway and just not move. Others it seems like the there might be a tiny bit of sun in the world after all. A mourning handout from the American Academy of Family Practice writes about a culture where one is considered “legitimately crazy” for a year after the death of someone loved. The person is allowed to be emotional, complain, wear their bathrobe all day and call people at 3 am.

Maybe we are all in that stage right now.

Stages of Grief Playlist 2

Denial

The Offspring: Pretty Fly for a White Guy

Bargaining

Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Hard Times Come Again No More

Anger

The Offspring: The opioid diaries

Acting Out

Nathanial Ratcliff and the Night Sweats: SOB

Revenge

Bessie Smith: Young Woman’s Blues

Grief

Over the Rhine: Let it Fall

Acceptance

Sweet Honey in the Rock: Run, Mourner, Run

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Stages of grief playlist

Stages of grief playlist

My sister had breast cancer for 7 years. She said that the five stages of grief missed two. She adds “Acting Out” and “Revenge”. I am planning a series of stages of grief playlists, because we are coming up on one million US citizens dead of Covid-19 and we are at six million world wide and counting. We need help grieving. I have other stuff going on to, so my go to is music.

Denial

Eagle Mountain String Band

Bargaining

Lake Street Dive: I want you back

Anger

Over the Rhine: oh yeah by the way

Acting out

Lily Allen: Smile

Revenge

Lily Allen: Fuck you

Grief

Citizen Cope: Sideways

Acceptance

Over the Rhine: All of My Favorite People

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AtoZ Theme Reveal

My theme for the April AtoZ blog challenge this year is art. I think it will mostly be my mother’s art. She died in 2000 of ovarian cancer. My only sibling died in 2012 of breast cancer and my father in 2013 of emphysema. And I have the art: my parents were both packrats and trying to deal with the house and an out of date will took about three years. Moving stuff around, getting rid of stuff. The art initially went in to a storage unit and then into my house. My mother Helen Burling Ottaway was prolific! And she kept every single piece of art and her diaries back to high school! I found a suitcase with my grandfather’s poetry as well: that will be for another day.

This painting is of my sister. My mother started oils later in her career and Michael Platt, a DC artist, said something like, “Quit doing tiny things. Do something big.” My mother started doing life size and larger than life portraits in chalk pastel and in oils. This painting captures my sister when she was twenty: emotions. I like it but I also think that it is frightening.

Christine Robbins Ottaway age 20, by Helen Burling Ottaway, oil, 1984

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

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Chaos

I wrote this poem a long time ago. I was thinking about how being a physician and taking care of other people let me avoid my own feelings. Doctors are trained to hide their feelings. When I was an intern, a patient died on my day off. I came back to find the person gone. No one on the team said anything. I was afraid I’d done something wrong. Was it my fault? Finally I screwed up my courage and spoke the the attending physician. “Oh!” he said, “I meant to talk to you about that patient. They had a lethal pulmonary embolus from the clot in their leg. They were appropriately anticoagulated. You did nothing wrong. This happens.”

I think the war is more of the same. Chaos, to avoid feeling. Let’s not do that. Let us grieve as a world. Let us not melt down in a conflagration. That is my prayer.

Chaos

So familiar

If there’s a mess And chaos
Home that’s home
Busy busy
Run around
Fire fire
Fix it
Crisis
Now what
Deal with it

No time for feelings

No no

No time

I don’t want chaos
Liar liar

Chaos is so safe

Hero hero
Put out the fire
Catch the baby
Confront
Not a hero really
Scared
Hiding

If I stop the chaos
I will have to feel



Maybe it’s ok
To feel a little

I forgive myself
I understand the chaos
I can let go of it      by degrees

I feel so vulnerable
In the quiet clean
     safe place
Take your time
sweet self

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: WAR.

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Sorrow

I used to stop by more

but the people were less and less

the interactions faded to grey

I didn’t feel loved

I used to be ok with that

not feeling loved

not feeling valued

but now I want to be loved

And I am loved, to my surprise

as if a little love

has opened longing

so that I want more love


I want to be loved and feel loved

I send everyone love

even those who have been mean

and the incessant downvoters

and those who have me blocked

or don’t answer or ignore

or leave the catbox when I show up

I send love to you too


but now that I have a small crack

of love in my life, like the sun

shining on a crack in concrete

the seed stirs in sun and water

and grows

written 12/26/17. I wrote this about another writing site. It is falling to bits, like a old building not maintained. It makes me sad, because it is where my sister used to write. She died in 2012 and I still often miss her.

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mad skills

What are your mad skills?

My maddest baddest skill, shared with my younger sister, is reading hidden emotions. Children of alcoholics and addicts learn that one young. Or die. Or start drinking/drugging to numb young.

Our culture is bloody weird. Emotions are stuffed like turkeys until people are near bursting. I swear that half my clinic time was letting people talk about emotions and then saying, well, those seem like pretty reasonable feelings in view of the insanity going on in your family. There would be a silence while the person thought about the horrible terrible feelings being reasonable and then I would say, “You said you want an antidepressant. Do you want to discuss that?”

Often people put it off. Once the feelings are OUT and present and looked at instead of stuffed/contained/terrifying, the person would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I need it.”

“Do you want to schedule to come back in two weeks?”

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If they wanted to start an antidepressant, I would caution that the recommendation was to stay on it for six months minimum if tolerated. Also, if they were starting it in June, I would say, “Don’t stop it in January. Wait until the sun is back. Here that can be July 4th. At least wait until spring.”

The plants are all thinking about spring now. My magnolia would like three more days of sun and then it will burst into bloom. The plums are budding and close to exploding. My camellia is usually first, but I trimmed it at the wrong time of year and so it is not blooming. It looks healthy, though. It is sort of sulking for a season. I would like to sulk for a season too.

Why is our culture, the US, so terrified of emotion? We think everything should be about logic. Emotions are both hormonally and electrically mediated through nerves and blood and they are INFORMATION about our environment and each other. We should let emotions roll through us like waves, and not worry about them so much. I think of myself as an ocean. The emotions are the weather. They roll through. Ok, big storm. Then rain, and lightening. Then low clouds and some fog. Then sun and a beautiful day to sail with a light breeze. But the deeper currents change slowly and the weather is not really that important. I reside in the depths.

The furor over rising prices seems ridiculous to me. The roaring twenties has begun already in housing and buying stuff on Amazon. I have bought two things from Amazon in the last two years. I like to buy local. One order was for my future daughter in law’s wish list. I think people are buying so that they do not have to feel. It is cultural mania. Everyone is rushing around trying to make money instead of grieving. Yesterday I thought, if this keeps up, we WILL have a depression like 1929.

Don’t do it. Don’t buy stuff to avoid the stuff inside. Sit still twice a day, for at least five minutes, and just listen. Try to listen to the depths.