A beginning, with nails

This blog is meant to be a way for me to work through immense grief. 

January 25, 2016. A birthday unlike any other. I spent the day driving up to Punxsatawney, PA, home of the groundhog Phil, and inspiration of sorts for the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, a film that holds a special place in my heart. I was deeply disillusioned to find that the little hommlet of Punxsatawney was a mummified remainder of what had once been a thriving if small industrial Pennsylvania town. The empty storefronts, sad people, and bad food were far worse than anything Phil Connors had to endure again and again every 6:00 am. The Punxsatawney of Bill Murray was mere Purgatory; the real town would have felt like a deep dark hell.

This saddened me, as I had hoped for picturesque, touristy, quaint, and still lively. I was greeted only with death moths. The film had, I knew, not been filmed in the real Punxsatawney, but rather in a fine place called Woodstock, Indiana. But I had not dreamed the reality would be so far removed. It was, in truth, a wretched marmot.

Yet, as that day devolved into dark truth, little did I know of the darker reality that would sunder my whole life.

In the past seven years I have lost almost everything that mattered to me. What, you ask? Why make such a fuss? 

I learned that I would be terminated from my professorial job of several years without good cause, mostly because the outgoing President wanted to stick it to Liberal Arts. I was one of five saps let go before tenure review. I later learned that people I thought were my colleagues had decided to sacrifice me, in order to forward various agendas of their own.

My father, sick with Parkinson's and Lewy Body Dementia for nine years, died in hospital, after a nearly two week stretch of agony. Hallucinating, sometimes delirious, sometimes outraged, he had gradually transformed into a stranger; yet he lived daily in a nightmare which no one could see. When he breathed his last, my mother lost her spirit.

I would go on to lose my home in Pittsburgh, my car, my childhood home, my career, my uncle who was like a second father to me, and my aunt who was like a second mother. I had a friend commit suicide after texting me to suggest it was my fault. I watched my first cousin die, aspirating on a piece of bread. And my mother began to show signs of Alzheimer's within a month of my dad's death, and so began a steady decline which let me watch part of her soul be corroded away each month, then each week. She spent the last few years confused, frightened, and bereft of one memory after another; in the end she was only able to lament that her son had never visited her, never called, never cared. 

I learned that my family was full of con artists, grifters, liars, and fools. Some of whom hated me, simmering with teenage resentments. And, most painful of all for some reason, I lost almost all my friends, many of whom simply dropped me after I had flamed out of academia...and others who just decided I wasn't worth it. Maybe I don't blame them.

But it's a mess. A pinebox mess.

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The purpose of this blog is not to cast blame, which I freely assume from here on out, but rather to work through the massive grief and loss I have felt every day for the past seven years. I have chosen a handful of books to help guide my daily reflections, although I cannot yet vouch for their value. I bought them, I was desperate. They should at least prompt reflection...which is all I can hope for. 

No one will read this, of course. But perhaps I can help myself, and maybe I can find peace.