A Difficult Week

     It's been exactly five years since the CVS Scotch Tape Incident. Feels like much longer. Sunday is the twelfth anniversary of the night Mimi died. That is always difficult. When I started this blog there was a post about it.
     She died when I was eleven, and so now she's been gone longer than I knew her. That is especially hard to understand.

     Just found this Bear Grylls article on grief in my Facebook newsfeed. Sure, I made fun of Man Vs. Wild, but it's that kind of show. Running Wild is interesting, and I enjoyed his memoir Mud, Sweat and Tears, at least what I heard of the audiobook version. He's a really interesting person. This was a good article, I thought. And it rereading it out loud gave me a chance for voiceover practice on doing his accent.
     In July 2013, Sunny died, and so I wrote about that. It was hard to deal with. Then in November 2013 Copper was hit by a car. That was bad, too. About a year after that Nano died late fall 2014, which has been hard to process, even though she was more than ready. Maybe that's why.  And Grandpa's cancer won three days before my birthday last May. I definitely haven't understood that yet.

     All of my stories for the last year or so seem to involve death of some sort, and it's the same way with classmates Brian and Lauren's stories, too. One of those jokes around the English Department. I kind of specialized in murder ballads in poetry classes, along the lines of Garth Brooks's "The Thunder Rolls" or Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away," "Choctaw County Affair" and "Two Black Cadillacs." Maybe it's an Oklahoma thing.
     Sure, most English majors employ the rule of thumb that when in doubt, you throw a murder into the plot, but even if we aren't trying to include it, characters still die. Brian's best stories from Fiction Writing were a Western revenge tale and one about a lonely, slowing-perishing baseball-loving widower. Lauren is a master of William Goldman-style suspense thrillers who loves Stephen King, and it shows - in a good way. Two weeks ago the couple's dog was put down in one of my flashfiction stories for Pop Market, and a novel I'm in the early stages of working on features a woman with terminal cancer as one of the main characters, while a minor character was a dog who was run over.
   
     Most of the weekend will be spent retyping old essays for the portfolio portion of Capstone, I think. Caleb gets back from Mexico Sunday night.