MGG - 7.02 - Dead - blog
Gloria died and I died as well. I just didn't stop breathing.
Possibly because I had been documenting, via email, Gloria's last days in the hospital, our family physician suggested that I do writing to deal with my grief. She probably had a private-bound grief journal in mind. I, of course, started a public blog.
I had created, and made one entry in, a blog about a dozen years before. So I had a blog that I could use. That's why the title is so weird.
So I collected, edited, and posted the material that I had been writing about Gloria's last days. And I drafted some material for Gloria's obituary and eulogy. I think I mentioned elsewhere I knew that I was going to have to write Gloria's eulogy because so many knew Gloria from so many different places and situations but nobody else knew all of what Gloria had done. I knew that it was likely that I would have to deliver the eulogy myself as well. I practiced reading that eulogy out loud every single day in order to get my grief bursts out of the way. As it eventually turned out I had a couple of months to practice it before we were able to do Gloria's actual memorial service.
And I diarized my grief and trauma and I posted a whole bunch of pictures of Gloria in one particular blog posting. And I posted pieces on what I was learning about grief. Kind of "A Grief Observed," volume two. And an awful lot of the entries were about situations, which ordinarily shouldn't have been terribly emotionally fraught, but which triggered grief bursts, usually completely out of left field.
(Some time ago the girls asked me if I had gone back and read the early entries in my blog to see if what I was currently experiencing was the same as what I had experienced earlier in the period immediately following Gloria's death. I had read some but not necessarily a lot. In writing this I am revisiting some of those postings, possibly for the first time in four years.)
Eventually I started writing other postings aside from those about grief. I bought a new vacuum cleaner and wrote a review of that. I wrote about picking up trash on my walks, walking everywhere around a new town. I posted about buying shoes. I posted about gardening. I posted about running across, completely by accident (and at two o'clock in the morning), a process of moving two houses from where they were to, well, elsewhere. Slowly, incrementally slowly, the blog started to be about things other than grief.
One of the observations and illustrations of grief that tend to be reused as memes around the grief accounts is that your grief does not diminish over time. It's more like your grief stays the same size but your life, eventually, starts to become larger around the grief. In a sense my blog and the move from entirely about grief to being about other things (as well as the grief), illustrates this idea.
Recently someone proposed doing a story about me as a blogger. The thing is I had never (and still don't) thought of myself as a blogger. The blog was just, originally, a convenient way to do grief journaling. I figured it wasn't a terrible invasion of my privacy to write my grief journal on a public blog since you can count the number of people who regularly read my blog on the fingers of one hand. I have posted links to certain of the non-grief journal postings, and, yes, a few more people have read those. But I know that absolutely nobody is interested in my private life. At least not enough to read it on a regular basis. If I based my self-worth on the number of people who read or even the fewer number who comment on my blog, I would be completely suicidal. (Well, yes, I *am* suicidal, so maybe that's not a great example.)
I consider myself to be a teacher. I used to write books but now I've lost my editor so possibly the blog is a kind of a version of continuing to write and to use the writing as some kind of a teaching instrument. I have used my blog to describe workshops that I was willing to teach and, latterly, have started to use the blog in order to provide adjunct materials to the workshops that I do. But I still don't consider myself a blogger. Not as such, anyway.
There is perhaps one other factor that is related to the blog. That is that, at about the same time that Gloria died, Google either developed Gboard, or I noticed that it was an option. As I have said, I do not know how to explain why I loathe and despise, to the very depths of my soul, soft keyboards on smartphones. I have hated them ever since actual physical keyboards disappeared from smartphones. So, for the first time in any really effective way, I had a piece of dictating software on my portable device: on my cell phone.
Having dictation capability was kind of game changer. I was working with a number of articles, and I was able to produce them much more quickly. I could also include an awful lot more that I probably would not have if I was typing the text out.
Tied in with the fact that I could dictate into email messages, this became not just dictation for articles, but reminders for all kinds of things. In particular, it became reminders of things that I wanted to write, possibly at a later time when I had either more time, or better connectivity, in order to deal with the dictation issues. (Gboard requires an internet connection in order to work.)
In addition to individual articles becoming longer, dictation allowed me to consider larger projects. So the presentations that I had always done, now became frameworks for creating entire articles, and sometimes even series of articles. The idea for the memoir came from the fact that I figured that it would be a lot easier to dictate the pieces.
And, of course, the ease of dictation also prompted the idea for the sermons.
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: TBA
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