I took some Dayquil this morning, so bear with me as we go on a journey of my confused consciousness. I don’t handle medication well. Although at the moment I am very calm, slow, and sleepy, none of which are unwelcome feelings.

First off, who’s interested in what’s going on with the van lately? I know I’m not, but I’m living it, so let me just share that we still don’t have our van back. We are on our fourth rental, because they keep having to take the rentals back to service them. Right now, I think we’re driving a Toyota. Or a Dodge? Who cares. The point is that neither Mobility Works nor Braun, which is the company who converted the van, know what is wrong with it. So they will be redoing the entire conversion, an exercise that will take something like three weeks. Everyone’s being really nice about it, and we do have the rentals, so getting around has been fine. Still, I’d like to end the saga of the van and move on to something else.

I have school fundraising calls to make this morning. And I’m still working on finishing up my video for A Life Story, which involves going through photos and boxes to find appropriate items to share as part of the B roll, the stuff they flash up on the screen while you hear my voice talking about what my life used to be like. While the filmmakers were going through a box of my things, they found a gangsta rap coloring book that my former team at work had decorated when I left the Bay Area for New York back in 2005. I don’t think that the gangsta rap coloring book should be a part of my movie, but I was pleased to see it once again. Coloring, like many things, is a skill I no longer possess.

This morning, maybe because I have a bit of a cold, my hands and arms aren’t working very well. And for some reason this came as a surprise to me, even though of course that’s the direction things have been heading for some time now.

I make my way around the stages of grief like someone on one of those Dance Dance Revolution pads. Acceptance! Acceptance! Denial and bargaining at the same time! Turn in a circle and put both feet on Anger. Anger! Anger! Anger! Anger! Now I’m just hopping up and down, and that’s not really good for dancing or for navigating grief. I’ll just pirouette over to depression and lay down there for a while.

Or, I don’t know, maybe my experience is more like a game of Twister, and if I put one body part on each stage of grief, my head will explode and this will all be over.

I’d like to thank today’s sponsor, Dayquil, for these vivid hallucinations.

But today the place that I find myself is not one of the five stages, and probably not one of the Dance Dance Revolution landings either. I’m just in shock. It happens. It’s not the same as denial, which despite what I wrote above, I don’t experience often, if at all. But I am shocked that this is my reality. How can it be so? When I say this to Rob, he doesn’t understand. “We don’t have any new information,” he says, but to me every morning brings new information.

I wake up from dreams where I’m walking, climbing stairs, falling with abandon into someone’s arms. I wake up and I stare out my window at the ocean, and I think that I always wanted to live near the ocean, but not like this. I wake up and I think about the list of things I have to do, and I wonder why it has to be so hard. And then I get out of bed, and I get started.

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