What Am I?

I wonder.

When I lost my Rex, it seems that I lost a large part of my identity.

This wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the huge chunk of me that I lost when I lost my job and couldn't get another one.

Since then, life itself seems to be chipping away at the essential "me."

I got a job and couldn't do it.
I write but have no way to share.
Shared writing has become more difficult and less frequent.
When I do write by hand, my fingers and thumb go numb, and I have muscle spasms all the way up my arm.

I am no longer a wife.
I'm still a mother, but my children are grown. (One is something of a big baby, but she's becoming an adult at a greatly decelerated rate.)
I'm a grandmother, but I can rarely see or take care of the babies, due to economics  (I'm usually literally out of gas.)When I do have them, they frazzle me, and it's not so easy to just take them home. I don't really want to, anyway.

I'm a writer, but losing the physical ability to write.

I'm a friend, but I have little to offer or share with my friends, when I can even keep in touch with them.

So, I am wondering, what am I?

Too Many Good-byes

There are too many people dying.

Do more people die in January (or January and February)  than other months, or does it just seem that way because we don't have fair-weather distractions?

Phyllis Walls was killed in a head-on collision on what I think was a familiar road. New Year's Day. What a great start to the New Year for her family, and fore her friends, even the long-ago-and-far-away ones. How horrible it is to have someone just not be there anymore. How horrible and how hard,

There has been another death, too, in my husband's family. Kevin Mullins. The husband of Rex's niece Eva, has passed away, and the whole family mourns yet again. They brought in the New Year in the hospital, with this horrific outcome. There have been too many deaths in this family in the last three to six months, and there are always too many deaths in the world.

A writer friend is sitting in a hospital waiting for her father to die. He went for one thing, developed another, and it has gone downhill from there. 

People should at least die from what's wrong with them, if they must die. (As we all must.)

It always seems to be wrong people who are dying, too. 

I don't mean the drug addicts, or even mass murderers, because I can understand that they may need extra chances to get it right,

I mean people with horrid diseases, slowly dying from the inside out.

I mean people who will never have independent lives again, and if they were in their right minds, would they want to live the dependent lives they are being forced to?

I even include people who are quietly soul starving, who live futile, desperate lives. Who perhaps want to "go home" or maybe they would only like to rest, for a really really long time.

Why can't these people be taken with such suddenness? Why is it the people with busy full lives who just disappear from the day-to-day of their families, their friends, their loved ones?

Well, life and love are mysteries, or so they say. 

Unsolved Mysteries.

Unfair Mysteries.

And it is only the 9th of January. 

The Working World: adapted from Facebook post.

I hate the job.
I hate the hours.
I hate the work.
I have to see straight lines and color variations. I can do neither of those things under the best of circumstances. And they make me wear safety glasses over my glasses -- y'all can maybe guess how exactly helpful it is to have an extra lens over your lenses when already your vision cannot be corrected to 20/20.

Plus my feet hurt, and my back twists (not as part of the job) I have muscle spasms in my back, in my butt, in my fingers. Comfy shoes are against the rules. We must wear steel toed shoes. They aren't too uncomfortable, but 12 hours and concrete floors are hard, even if I were walking on air.
My hips feel as if they are going to just pop out of their sockets, and that scares me.
I spend my breaks in the bathroom so I can just take off my shoes.




I really wish I didn't have to wear the safety glasses. That extra lens has my vision all discombobulated. But they don't have the side pieces to slip onto glasses, and it's unacceptable to buy my own and wear them. I asked.

Of course, two days doesn't equal a fair chance, so I will be going back tomorrow as I'm scheduled to, but I have to tell you -- it's really really hard, and really really painful. I hope/wish they would find me another job. there's too much waiting on the next person or the last person on the job I am doing. It would be much easier if I could stay steady busy.

But I'll keep trying. Who will come and roll me to the car when mu legs won't support me as I roll out of bed one fine morning? I wish we were having the blizzard. But too much rest may be just as bad, so maybe I'll just roll out in the morning and roll on in