It's been a really difficult year since I last posted on here. I just reread my "Upbeat Updates" post and almost started crying.
One of the happiest summers of my life was followed by one of the saddest falls and longest winters I've yet endured...
My dad died suddenly from an aneurysm in October 2014. I was sitting in my boyfriend's apartment on an early Sunday afternoon frantically studying for a tax exam I had the next morning when I got a phone call from my brother telling me that Dad was in a helicopter being flown to the hospital, but he didn't know what happened, just that Mom and my little sister had found him unconscious on the floor when they went to check on him after he didn't show up to church. My brother told me he'd text me with updates, but that I shouldn't worry and everything would probably be fine, he was just letting me know.
I couldn't study anymore. I just sat there and stared at my phone... waiting... Even though I didn't know what was going on, I still knew somehow that this was serious. After a while I texted and asked if I should head out and start driving home, since it's about a 2.5-hour drive.
"No, it'll be okay, no need to rush home," he texted back.
Not even 20 minutes later he texted again, "You should come home Juby."
He didn't give me details or say why I needed to be there, but I knew it was to say goodbye.
My boyfriend drove me back to my dorm room and I frantically threw some clothes into an overnight bag, not really thinking of what to pack or for how many days, and I ended up forgetting some simple essentials. The thought of bringing some black clothes in case of a funeral crossed my mind and I started sobbing.
My boyfriend started driving and at some point I must've stopped crying because I remember feeling completely empty and numb, staring at power lines and trees as they whizzed past. A different brother called me and asked if I could stop by the VA mental hospital on my way to pick him up. It wasn't really on the way, and I was a little annoyed at having to waste time getting him, but I agreed and gave my boyfriend the directions to his ward.
It was getting near dinner time and my boyfriend and I hadn't eaten anything yet, so we stopped quickly at a Taco Bell to get some food. I wasn't hungry, but I ordered something anyway, and an extra burrito for the brother I was picking up. It just so happened that that day Taco Bell took forever and the employees were goofing off in the kitchen. They weren't really busy, but it was a longer-than-usual time to get us our food. Part of that might have also been because every second counted to me and I was in agony waiting to see my Dad.
We picked up my brother and continued on our way to the hospital. When we got there, my family was nowhere to be found and nobody was answering their phones, so I explained who I was and who I was looking for to the hospital staff and they took me to the ICU to see my dad. When I entered the little curtained-off room, I saw him laying in the bed, unconscious, with dirty, greasy hair, tubes up his nose, a large hose down his throat, and monitors everywhere. I thought maybe he was sleeping or sedated, so I went over and grabbed his hand. It was exceptionally cold for a man whose large, calloused hands were always very warm. His arm was limp and he didn't squeeze back or react at all. I tried talking to him, but he didn't respond. I burst into tears again and we were shown the way to the waiting room where I found some more of my family sitting around.
Not long afterwards, the doctor came in and explained that Dad had an aneurysm and the blood put so much pressure on his brain that he was comatose, brain dead, and probably wouldn't hold on much longer. My mom begged him to try to keep my dad alive just a little longer so that more of my siblings could get to the hospital to say goodbye (several were still driving across the states or flying into airports). The doctor said he'd do his best, but there was no telling when my dad's heart would give out.
The rest of the day dragged on with bouts of crying and irritability among family members, rotations in the ICU visiting my dad and talking/singing/praying to him, and trying to take unsuccessful naps in the waiting room.
That night was a blur and I didn't really sleep at all on my brother's couch. I cried so hard that I started hyperventilating and I thought I was going to choke. I'm not sure when it really hit me that my dad was already dead, but when we got an urgent phone call very early in the morning to come back to the hospital because his heart was failing, I felt like I was in less of a hurry to see him again. Why bother? He couldn't hear me, see me, feel me. He was already gone before I even got the text from my brother telling me to start driving.
Two of my siblings (my older sister and my oldest brother) didn't make it in time to see him before his heart stopped and he was pronounced dead. Death is an ugly thing, and not at all like it seems in the movies. It wasn't peaceful or tragic when his heart gave up, it was just gross and weird. We were all huddled in a room that was far too small for a family as big as ours, ugly crying with snot dripping down everywhere, and it smelled horrid. My dad's lifeless corpse was expelling gases (and defecating) as he lost control of his bodily functions. Slowly we watched the blood pressure numbers tick down and his heart rate fade out and then stop as the obnoxious alarms on the machines went off. A nurse came in and turned off the monitors so we could stand around his dead body in silence and stench not knowing what to do.
One by one we left his side and went back to the waiting room. Once we were all gathered again, someone came in to explain how the morgue worked and that they would refrigerate his body until we had chosen a funeral home. I started Googling and calling different places in the area to ask about their availability and prices. My dad was very specific about how he wanted to be buried. He didn't want to be embalmed or preserved, and he wanted a coffin made out of biodegradable materials, and he wanted to be wrapped in a wool blanket and buried on the farm, on top of a specific hill that overlooked the valley.
Over the next few days, I was the one who somehow had the most composure and organizational skills to find out about the legality and procedures needed in order to give my dad the unusual burial that he wanted. I arranged and planned the funeral, mostly by myself, and it was awful.
We dug the hole in the hill ourselves, using a combination of machinery (Unimog) and hand shovels. The sand and stones were difficult to cut through and it took us a long time to dig a hole deep enough. Some of my brothers started fighting during the process, as they're prone to doing.
The funeral itself was relatively uneventful. We didn't have a service beforehand, just a burial, as my dad requested. There was no priest. There was no scripted eulogy. My family took turns going around and saying a few words, and then some neighbors and friends of his that showed up said some words, and we put the dirt on top of him.
Aunts and uncles flew or drove in the next day since they couldn't get there in time for the funeral, and we had a small gathering together and played board games and cooked and ate food and tried to cheer each other up. A little while later, we bought a bunch of plants and flower seeds and a maple tree sapling, just like my dad wanted, and we planted it all on top of his grave.
I never went back to work at the city as a finance/accounting intern for the rest of the fall, since I had already been planning on leaving, they said they'd just consider the week before and the week of my dad's funeral as my 2-weeks notice, so I went in later to drop off my name tag and fill out some paper work and I was done.
The rest of the fall semester was pretty rough and I had a really hard time concentrating or getting out of bed to go to class. The holidays were also pretty sad without my dad.
My aunt was diagnosed with cancer for the last time and was told that it was untreatable and she only had a few months left to live, so my boyfriend and I flew out to visit her in early December, just after the semester ended, to help out my uncle and to visit her one last time before she died. She held on until April of 2015.
As much as I loved my roommate, we both decided that we would move out for the spring semester so that we could work our full-time jobs a little easier and not commute as far. So in December I moved back in with my boyfriend and his roommates.
I was lucky enough to land a great full-time internship opportunity for the spring semester and get credits for working instead of doing classes. I worked at a top-10 national accounting firm (CLA) and did taxes and audits for up to 70 hours a week from January through April. It was a lot of work, and I was pretty depressed a lot of the time because of the stress of work, winter, and the loss of my dad and my aunt.
My aunt was cremated and the memorial was delayed until May, so I flew back out to Maryland to see my uncle again and attend my aunt's service.
Summer of 2015, I was even more fortunate to get a full-time internship with one of the big-4 global accounting firms (EY). I moved down to Milwaukee from June through August and traveled to Madison a lot for my auditing clients. I was pretty lonely a lot of the time since I don't know a ton of people in the Milwaukee area and my boyfriend was an hour and a half away.
Somewhere along the way from November 2014 to August 2015 I packed on 30 pounds of weight (stress and depression eating, office work?).
I got 3 job offers over the summer, one from the city government, one from CLA accounting firm, and one from EY accounting firm. CLA's offer was the best, and I didn't want to move to Milwaukee for EY, so I signed my offer letter and will start working for them full-time when I finally graduate in June 2016. I will be working for them part-time starting in January as I finish up my last classes.
I guess this long-winded rant brings me to today... Things are starting to get better, I think. It was really rough for a long time, but there have been ups and downs, and I'm back on my antidepressant medication and I've started eating healthier and even took a 7-week jogging class and lost 10 pounds so far. Sticking to diets is really hard for me when I get under a lot of stress, especially with school, because then I start making bad snacking choices and stop going to the gym so I can study longer.
I'm still really critical of myself, and I've been trying to bring my GPA back up because I want to graduate with summa cum laude (3.9) but I'm only at a 3.876 right now (the fall semester that my dad died didn't help my GPA). It doesn't really matter since I already have a career lined up for post-graduation, but it's one of those little goals I set for myself back in high school and it would mean a lot to me if I could graduate with a 3.9 GPA.
My boyfriend and I are still going strong, and I love him to the edges of the universe and back. I don't think I could've made it through this past year without him. We got our first one-bedroom apartment all to ourselves in August. In September we adopted a cat. Her name is Inara, she's about a year old, and she is very cuddly and adorable.
My boyfriend has been struggling with his own problems a lot lately too. His parents have declining physical health and his dad may have to get a knee replacement surgery, which would mean that his carpeting business would be out of the question and he would have to go on disability. His mom has something wrong with her back that makes her doing her hospital/nursing work difficult and they might have a hard time support themselves and his autistic brother in a few years.
It doesn't help that he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life for a career. He has a bachelor's in criminal justice but after all the ride-alongs and job shadowing, he doesn't want to be a police officer. He's been working part-time at Best Buy since early this year, and he went back to school in spring to pursue finance and actuarial science, but then decided that wasn't for him, so this fall semester he switched to a math major and looked at secondary education, but now he withdrew from school and is working full-time at Best Buy. He's apparently always top in sales performance at the store and is doing really well there, so I think the current plan is to try to work his way up through the ranks to management, or just keep working there at least until he's figured out what he wants to do. Retail hours kind of suck, though. He has an unpredictable schedule and holidays are the busiest time for him.
I miss my dad, and I wish I could be as optimistic and happy as I was last year during the summer, but I guess everything takes time. It's just that right now it feels like I might not ever be that happy again.
I hate fall. I mean, don't get me wrong, pumpkins are great and I love the changing colors of the leaves and the moderately warm temperature that isn't so in-your-face humid as summers in Wisconsin, but I hate the dread that I feel during fall. I hate daylight savings time and having sunsets at 5pm. I hate feeling tired, cold, and groggy all day long from November to early April. I always fear the end of summer and beginning of the season changes. I need more light in my life. I can't stand being in darkness for so long. I'm pretty sure I have seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in addition to regular depression. I've never specifically been diagnosed for it, but I've also never really tried talking to a psychiatrist about how much I hate winter.
Anyway, I will just sit here with my SAD and depression and try to chug through the rest of the fall and my last year of school before I start my "adult" career...
One of the happiest summers of my life was followed by one of the saddest falls and longest winters I've yet endured...
My dad died suddenly from an aneurysm in October 2014. I was sitting in my boyfriend's apartment on an early Sunday afternoon frantically studying for a tax exam I had the next morning when I got a phone call from my brother telling me that Dad was in a helicopter being flown to the hospital, but he didn't know what happened, just that Mom and my little sister had found him unconscious on the floor when they went to check on him after he didn't show up to church. My brother told me he'd text me with updates, but that I shouldn't worry and everything would probably be fine, he was just letting me know.
I couldn't study anymore. I just sat there and stared at my phone... waiting... Even though I didn't know what was going on, I still knew somehow that this was serious. After a while I texted and asked if I should head out and start driving home, since it's about a 2.5-hour drive.
"No, it'll be okay, no need to rush home," he texted back.
Not even 20 minutes later he texted again, "You should come home Juby."
He didn't give me details or say why I needed to be there, but I knew it was to say goodbye.
My boyfriend drove me back to my dorm room and I frantically threw some clothes into an overnight bag, not really thinking of what to pack or for how many days, and I ended up forgetting some simple essentials. The thought of bringing some black clothes in case of a funeral crossed my mind and I started sobbing.
My boyfriend started driving and at some point I must've stopped crying because I remember feeling completely empty and numb, staring at power lines and trees as they whizzed past. A different brother called me and asked if I could stop by the VA mental hospital on my way to pick him up. It wasn't really on the way, and I was a little annoyed at having to waste time getting him, but I agreed and gave my boyfriend the directions to his ward.
It was getting near dinner time and my boyfriend and I hadn't eaten anything yet, so we stopped quickly at a Taco Bell to get some food. I wasn't hungry, but I ordered something anyway, and an extra burrito for the brother I was picking up. It just so happened that that day Taco Bell took forever and the employees were goofing off in the kitchen. They weren't really busy, but it was a longer-than-usual time to get us our food. Part of that might have also been because every second counted to me and I was in agony waiting to see my Dad.
We picked up my brother and continued on our way to the hospital. When we got there, my family was nowhere to be found and nobody was answering their phones, so I explained who I was and who I was looking for to the hospital staff and they took me to the ICU to see my dad. When I entered the little curtained-off room, I saw him laying in the bed, unconscious, with dirty, greasy hair, tubes up his nose, a large hose down his throat, and monitors everywhere. I thought maybe he was sleeping or sedated, so I went over and grabbed his hand. It was exceptionally cold for a man whose large, calloused hands were always very warm. His arm was limp and he didn't squeeze back or react at all. I tried talking to him, but he didn't respond. I burst into tears again and we were shown the way to the waiting room where I found some more of my family sitting around.
Not long afterwards, the doctor came in and explained that Dad had an aneurysm and the blood put so much pressure on his brain that he was comatose, brain dead, and probably wouldn't hold on much longer. My mom begged him to try to keep my dad alive just a little longer so that more of my siblings could get to the hospital to say goodbye (several were still driving across the states or flying into airports). The doctor said he'd do his best, but there was no telling when my dad's heart would give out.
The rest of the day dragged on with bouts of crying and irritability among family members, rotations in the ICU visiting my dad and talking/singing/praying to him, and trying to take unsuccessful naps in the waiting room.
That night was a blur and I didn't really sleep at all on my brother's couch. I cried so hard that I started hyperventilating and I thought I was going to choke. I'm not sure when it really hit me that my dad was already dead, but when we got an urgent phone call very early in the morning to come back to the hospital because his heart was failing, I felt like I was in less of a hurry to see him again. Why bother? He couldn't hear me, see me, feel me. He was already gone before I even got the text from my brother telling me to start driving.
Two of my siblings (my older sister and my oldest brother) didn't make it in time to see him before his heart stopped and he was pronounced dead. Death is an ugly thing, and not at all like it seems in the movies. It wasn't peaceful or tragic when his heart gave up, it was just gross and weird. We were all huddled in a room that was far too small for a family as big as ours, ugly crying with snot dripping down everywhere, and it smelled horrid. My dad's lifeless corpse was expelling gases (and defecating) as he lost control of his bodily functions. Slowly we watched the blood pressure numbers tick down and his heart rate fade out and then stop as the obnoxious alarms on the machines went off. A nurse came in and turned off the monitors so we could stand around his dead body in silence and stench not knowing what to do.
One by one we left his side and went back to the waiting room. Once we were all gathered again, someone came in to explain how the morgue worked and that they would refrigerate his body until we had chosen a funeral home. I started Googling and calling different places in the area to ask about their availability and prices. My dad was very specific about how he wanted to be buried. He didn't want to be embalmed or preserved, and he wanted a coffin made out of biodegradable materials, and he wanted to be wrapped in a wool blanket and buried on the farm, on top of a specific hill that overlooked the valley.
Over the next few days, I was the one who somehow had the most composure and organizational skills to find out about the legality and procedures needed in order to give my dad the unusual burial that he wanted. I arranged and planned the funeral, mostly by myself, and it was awful.
We dug the hole in the hill ourselves, using a combination of machinery (Unimog) and hand shovels. The sand and stones were difficult to cut through and it took us a long time to dig a hole deep enough. Some of my brothers started fighting during the process, as they're prone to doing.
The funeral itself was relatively uneventful. We didn't have a service beforehand, just a burial, as my dad requested. There was no priest. There was no scripted eulogy. My family took turns going around and saying a few words, and then some neighbors and friends of his that showed up said some words, and we put the dirt on top of him.
Aunts and uncles flew or drove in the next day since they couldn't get there in time for the funeral, and we had a small gathering together and played board games and cooked and ate food and tried to cheer each other up. A little while later, we bought a bunch of plants and flower seeds and a maple tree sapling, just like my dad wanted, and we planted it all on top of his grave.
I never went back to work at the city as a finance/accounting intern for the rest of the fall, since I had already been planning on leaving, they said they'd just consider the week before and the week of my dad's funeral as my 2-weeks notice, so I went in later to drop off my name tag and fill out some paper work and I was done.
The rest of the fall semester was pretty rough and I had a really hard time concentrating or getting out of bed to go to class. The holidays were also pretty sad without my dad.
My aunt was diagnosed with cancer for the last time and was told that it was untreatable and she only had a few months left to live, so my boyfriend and I flew out to visit her in early December, just after the semester ended, to help out my uncle and to visit her one last time before she died. She held on until April of 2015.
As much as I loved my roommate, we both decided that we would move out for the spring semester so that we could work our full-time jobs a little easier and not commute as far. So in December I moved back in with my boyfriend and his roommates.
I was lucky enough to land a great full-time internship opportunity for the spring semester and get credits for working instead of doing classes. I worked at a top-10 national accounting firm (CLA) and did taxes and audits for up to 70 hours a week from January through April. It was a lot of work, and I was pretty depressed a lot of the time because of the stress of work, winter, and the loss of my dad and my aunt.
My aunt was cremated and the memorial was delayed until May, so I flew back out to Maryland to see my uncle again and attend my aunt's service.
Summer of 2015, I was even more fortunate to get a full-time internship with one of the big-4 global accounting firms (EY). I moved down to Milwaukee from June through August and traveled to Madison a lot for my auditing clients. I was pretty lonely a lot of the time since I don't know a ton of people in the Milwaukee area and my boyfriend was an hour and a half away.
Somewhere along the way from November 2014 to August 2015 I packed on 30 pounds of weight (stress and depression eating, office work?).
I got 3 job offers over the summer, one from the city government, one from CLA accounting firm, and one from EY accounting firm. CLA's offer was the best, and I didn't want to move to Milwaukee for EY, so I signed my offer letter and will start working for them full-time when I finally graduate in June 2016. I will be working for them part-time starting in January as I finish up my last classes.
I guess this long-winded rant brings me to today... Things are starting to get better, I think. It was really rough for a long time, but there have been ups and downs, and I'm back on my antidepressant medication and I've started eating healthier and even took a 7-week jogging class and lost 10 pounds so far. Sticking to diets is really hard for me when I get under a lot of stress, especially with school, because then I start making bad snacking choices and stop going to the gym so I can study longer.
I'm still really critical of myself, and I've been trying to bring my GPA back up because I want to graduate with summa cum laude (3.9) but I'm only at a 3.876 right now (the fall semester that my dad died didn't help my GPA). It doesn't really matter since I already have a career lined up for post-graduation, but it's one of those little goals I set for myself back in high school and it would mean a lot to me if I could graduate with a 3.9 GPA.
My boyfriend and I are still going strong, and I love him to the edges of the universe and back. I don't think I could've made it through this past year without him. We got our first one-bedroom apartment all to ourselves in August. In September we adopted a cat. Her name is Inara, she's about a year old, and she is very cuddly and adorable.
My boyfriend has been struggling with his own problems a lot lately too. His parents have declining physical health and his dad may have to get a knee replacement surgery, which would mean that his carpeting business would be out of the question and he would have to go on disability. His mom has something wrong with her back that makes her doing her hospital/nursing work difficult and they might have a hard time support themselves and his autistic brother in a few years.
It doesn't help that he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life for a career. He has a bachelor's in criminal justice but after all the ride-alongs and job shadowing, he doesn't want to be a police officer. He's been working part-time at Best Buy since early this year, and he went back to school in spring to pursue finance and actuarial science, but then decided that wasn't for him, so this fall semester he switched to a math major and looked at secondary education, but now he withdrew from school and is working full-time at Best Buy. He's apparently always top in sales performance at the store and is doing really well there, so I think the current plan is to try to work his way up through the ranks to management, or just keep working there at least until he's figured out what he wants to do. Retail hours kind of suck, though. He has an unpredictable schedule and holidays are the busiest time for him.
I miss my dad, and I wish I could be as optimistic and happy as I was last year during the summer, but I guess everything takes time. It's just that right now it feels like I might not ever be that happy again.
I hate fall. I mean, don't get me wrong, pumpkins are great and I love the changing colors of the leaves and the moderately warm temperature that isn't so in-your-face humid as summers in Wisconsin, but I hate the dread that I feel during fall. I hate daylight savings time and having sunsets at 5pm. I hate feeling tired, cold, and groggy all day long from November to early April. I always fear the end of summer and beginning of the season changes. I need more light in my life. I can't stand being in darkness for so long. I'm pretty sure I have seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in addition to regular depression. I've never specifically been diagnosed for it, but I've also never really tried talking to a psychiatrist about how much I hate winter.
Anyway, I will just sit here with my SAD and depression and try to chug through the rest of the fall and my last year of school before I start my "adult" career...
