WORKING THROUGH GRIEF
I’m Sad, So I’m Going to Buy Something I Don’t Need and Can’t Afford
It’s the American way.
Cleaning out my mom’s house alone is something I never really thought about in advance. I don’t know if I thought it would just magically happen or what, but it’s a Herculean task that’s destroying what tiny scraps of mental health I had to begin with.
I think I’ve finally found the last ticking time bomb — a cache of letters hidden in the back of an underwear drawer. Most of them are from my mom’s parents when she moved to Ohio from Kentucky in 1946 to attend beauty school. She was 17 years old.
But one of them is a love letter to her from my dad. Just one, but one is enough.
I, the perpetrator of two failed marriages and exactly zero successful relationships (including even friendships), can’t read that letter without wondering what their secret was. And of course, there is no secret. I’m just a defective human being who can’t feel any good emotions, only the bad ones.
Anyhoo, I’m going to salve that particular wound by buying a giant truck.
The problem with “test driving” a vehicle is that, once you get behind the wheel your brain whispers, “Yessss, my…
