If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve already been privy to this photo. If not, then surprise! I have a father!

Both of my parents have birthdays over the next week (and Father’s Day was on Sunday. Thankfully mine was in sipping hard liquor with me so it was rather hard to forget) so there will be more on them later but for now a place holder. Also; SPOILER ALERT: The last 27 years have been swell. Try not to think about your parents in the next 27 years or else you will have tears. Serious tears that you have to hide. Also try not to be a morbid asshole like me!

Ok then. Parents are good. I don’t say it enough but I adore mine.

I recently posted this on Facebook and Flickr because, oh, look at my Daddy’s punim:

Not five minutes later Garrett comments on my photo with,”Doesn’t beat my picture”:

Meanwhile my father is somewhere with his ear’s burning trying to figure out how to use The Google.

From about February to July there was a massive amount of work related craziness going on. I think I alluded to it when I mentioned the sudden onset of gray hairs, a departure from sleeping and a sudden interest in Dewar’s. The craziness lead to numerous trips to Washington, DC where I’d arrive at BWI at 8:15 in the morning, sprint through the Cannon Building, then back to BWI for an 8:45 PM flight. The only diverting from that schedule involved stopping to look at the top of the Capitol and whether or not I should jump off of it now or later.

Since I was too busy figuring out the trajectory of my body from the top of a monument – ANY monument – it meant that my friendships with those in my adopted hometown fell to the wayside. That is unless of course your office was either in the Longworth Building or you didn’t mind eating at Bistro Bis everyday for a month. And by eating I mean, damn, that champagne was tasty. Did I mention the stress?

The person I left out most was my dear Amy. I couldn’t make the effort to get to her house and then there would be much suffering and lamenting on the fine art of dealing with Life (see also; affinity for Scotch). And…God…there just wasn’t anytime. And because I am that much of an asshole of a friend, I’d tell everyone on Twitter that I’d be in DC along with some well placed whinging about how hard it is to have to spend an hour between meetings at Anthropologie. Woe is motherfucking, me. Later she would tell me that she read every single one of those tweets and why didn’t I just call her or something? She would have come into the city to meet me. She WANTED to come into the city to meet me.

Now here’s the part where I further emphasize how awful I am as a friend. You do NOT want me to be your friend or even your family. There’s a lot of forgetting, drunk-dialing, crying on the phone, drinking an excessive amount of wine at your two-year-old’s birthday party, and I cannot tell you the number of times I have found out very important information via third-party because I don’t answer my phone. Actually scratch that last part because I could call Susan 19 times in a row to tell her that I’m dying from exsanguination right this very second and she’d finally return the call three days later and be all nonchalant, like really? Your femoral artery? There’s blood there? Huh? What shoes were you wearing before you bled out?

But this is about me and my shittiness as a friend. I suck. The end.

Finally, Amy and I got to hang out to go see Vampire Weekend. We got a little tipsy, we double-fisted shitty beers and she presented me with this gem as she told me how much of a sucktastic friend I am. I am the friend who doesn’t get drunk with her so she had to give me a spreadsheet to tell me why, in fact, I need to get drunk with her.

And I remembered how much I missed her. There have been brief moments of hanging out since then but no one-on-one time like the good old days. We adore each other as much as ever but I’d like to kick back with a few bottles of wine on her couch with Ceiba running around maniacally. The best part about our friendship is that we both can talk the shit out of anything. We also have no problem busting out the red and white wine glasses at 3 PM.

Now this has happened. My Amy is pregnant. Of course the day she told me I was in a foul mood of epic proportions and while sitting in the atrium of the Desmond Hotel I screamed. Very, very loudly. I could go into the more intimate aspects of a friendship you have with someone when they’ve let you into their house, hearts and family. I’m no parent but there has to be some sort of strong bond between you and the first person you would entrust your newborn to, right? She told me to watch her 5 week old and in return I got one of my best friends in the world. The words in my vocabulary to exclaim the elation I have for Amy, Jason, Noah and Ezra are far too few. But as she told me on the phone last week, “You get to me an aunt again!” I couldn’t be happier.

Garrett wasn’t always the size of a linebacker and I’ve looked the same since 1991. You guys? I’ve been cute for like 20 years. Surely that’s some sort of record*.

*Uh, yeah right. Especially since right now I’m rocking the ‘hot mess’ look.

My baby brother turns 24 today. There’s some meaningful ‘sunrise, sunset’, ‘I remember when…’ that should be inserted here but I have none of that except: 24. Shit. This past fall he started Law School and on the day he started I tweeted something about this momentous occasion only to have my friend, Slynnro, reply back with: “Don’t expect to like your brother again for two years”. I laughed because it couldn’t possibly be that bad. He only has to be all, “Engle v. Vitale! New York Times  Co. v. Sullivan! Warren Court!” and voila, he has a law degree.

Here’s how exchanges between us have gone over the past nine months in between him writing 20 page legal briefs and studying until the ass crack of dawn and me being, well, me:

Me: GARRETT!

Him: Ugh. What do you want?

Me: Hiiiiii!

Him: God. Why are you here?

Me: I wanted to say hi! Hug me!

Him: HEATHER! God. MOOOOOOM!

Me: I love you

Him: Leave.

Me: Ok, I’m leaving now. Bye Garrett.

Him: BYE!

Me: *smiles*

Him: *slams the door*

During his most recent and rare day off:

Him: Happy Easter! (via text message)

Me: *stands there and skeptically looks at the phone expecting it to blow up in my face*  *waits 15 minutes because it’s gonna blow right?*

Me: Happy Easter to you too!

Him: Did you talk to mom yet?

Days later I tell my mother of this conversation to which she replies: “Yeah, he told me Happy Easter, too. I couldn’t figure out why he was being so nice…”

Happy, Happy Birthday G,

I am really fucking proud of you. And it’s official: You’re smarter than I will ever be or ever could hope to be.

Love,

Heather

How about starting this year over? Or maybe using the last two months of extraordinary heartache as a jumping off point for bettering myself and my surroundings? Or maybe I’ll just enjoy some Malbec and give The Universe the middle finger.

Tomorrow we’ll have some champagne and begin again but the year will be a little rough around the edges.

When someone dies it’s hard not to sit down and meticulously go over each bit of your own life. It’s like being a child and finding a rock; we start to examine every surface, running our hands over the smooth edges and the rough bits, looking over and under wanting to figure it out. The little things in life feel new again.

I took a trip for vacation and a little inspiration. To enjoy Vitamin D and wear flip flops for just a few days. And the week that I decide to throw caution to the wind and dig my heels into something new and something I have always found far bigger than myself or what I could ever be capable of…well…that week is met with a bit of heartache and sorrow.

My mother’s sister died yesterday while I was busy relishing in the ideas that Helen Jane and I had bounced between each other the evening before, my aunt died in her sleep just as she wanted to. With my mother sitting next to her and because after six years of waging war against breast cancer she grew tired or so my mother said.

I could go on and on about how my mother is living a life quite similar to that of Joan Didion’s ‘year of magical thinking’. And that I am trying my damndest to think of what, if anything I can do for her, but really I’m just a kid inspecting my life in response to this death. Even though we knew that it was coming just like the death before, it is still difficult. You’re heart still tugs a little especially because it’s breast cancer; that disease that we talk and talk and talk about and I will run a 5K for come May and it has now come to kick me in the ass as well. But instead of giving a big fuck you to February for being just as terrible as January, I suddenly feel a little bit more inspired. I want to be more positive, to try a little harder, to be a better me and hell, I want to just be. I don’t want to think too much about the what if’s and the failures but at least make a bit of a leap in hopes of hitting success.

Death fills me with cliches but really it is just a reminder that we only get a chance to do this once. So now I feel that much more compelled to make it count.

Whenever there’s a death in a coworker’s family or a serious illness a mass email is sent out to all 300 plus employees detailing our colleague’s struggles and where condolecses and cards can be sent. A few months ago my friend Paul (who reads this site and likes to quote it back to me on a regular basis which is AWESOME when he’s reminding me of that time I wrote about puking in my bathtub) had surgery and a mass email went out. So The Roommate and I joked that if that were ever the case – if either of us found ourselves in some awful predicament – the world need not know about it. I don’t want my entire office getting an email detailing my successful bunion removal surgery. Though knowing me it would be something like “Heather Barmore is at home recovering from successful liposuction. Cards and well wishes can be sent to…”

When my grandmother died a week ago Friday, my mother and I were both adamant about who should know. When two days later my mother’s sister happened to have emergency heart surgery and my mother fled the building? The entire office knew. There is nothing more awkward then going to get sugar for your coffee while people give you the pity look and start to approach you with outstretched arms because surely an awkward hug will do in a time of grief.

I don’t do sympathy well and I’m not from a group of people that generally are into expressing love and devotion by touching one another. Then again, I’m from a family who thinks that alcohol is the Devil’s water, believes that they brought me into this world and will gladly take me out,  and swearing will easily get you beaten with a belt and yet I haven’t been kicked out yet! Holy fuck!

Last week has disabled my witty gene. The part of me that thinks it’s really funny to make jokes about that time that January bent me over and pulled my hair. Last week fucking sucked. But I do that a lot. I’m good with hyperbolic claims of how awful something is and it’s usually something stupid that can be remedied but this past week wasn’t. When you feel like your family is going to be picked off one by one and you’re living in a poor woman’s Joan Didion novel and you wish there was a Great Big Book of Bereavement to get you through 72 hours of family time, your mother crying, you making your mother cry, swearing at your family, and bonus points for your inordinarily large uncle having the audacity to call you fat while your mother sits by and laughs. My God, I wish there were a how to guide for not tossing yourself off the highest precipice in the New York metropolitan area.

I’m fucking exhausted and still not willing to start doling out blow jobs to February for being superb for a whole 25 hours. I’m still too deflated from pessimism and that horrible feeling that comes from sitting in the first pew during a funeral and knowing that there is strong possibility of it happening again before the year ends, to even remotely high five anyone for getting me through January. Perhaps next week or the week after. Or maybe the one where I’m in California drinking tequila with a few of my favorites. But for now it’s a limp ‘Hey. How are ya’ to February even if it keeps nudging me on the shoulder telling me to cheer up. Right now my heart’s just not in it.

Someday I would like for someone to tell me that staying home would be OK. That it’s shitty outside and the drive will be treacherous and you’re completely emotionally unavailable. Never mind that you’ve been able to get through things with your eyes closed because you have to just do them but you should just sit back and relax and not think about voting records and proper car placement during a snowstorm. That will all be taken care of for you. Instead you should just sit back and relax, everything that needs to be done will be done and when you wake up in the morning, there will be one less thing for you to worry about. One less something tugging intently at your sleeve, begging you for attention. Instead when you wake up, you won’t think about how your mother cried and people who are trying to be helpful but are more annoying than helpful. Because in the morning, when you wake up, things will be better.

January has been a bitch. Correction, I have been January’s bitch and feel free to insert any insinuation of bending over and grabbing one’s ankles. That’s how January has been to me and I don’t think that January knows the meaning of the word ‘gentle’. Or ‘lubrication’ for that matter.

In the middle of putting on my earrings this morning my mother called and then texted. With one earring in and only one sock in sight, she informed me that my grandmother – her mother – is dying. “She’s taken a turn for the worse”, were the exact words. Phrasing like that makes me think that we’re trapped in Ma and Pa Ingalls kitchen while Mary battles scarlet fever. But there I was half dressed and discombobulated when my lip started to tremble and again…the tears.

Though at least it was something tangible as opposed to the tears of yore that were due to a dip in the bipolar spectrum. This time there was something I could put my finger on; the possible death of a grandparent which inevitably tosses me in the murky water of contemplating mortality. That of my parents and then of my mother’s sister. My mother’s sister who was reading “Peaceful Dying” on Christmas Eve. When I brought the choice of literature up to my mother she answered matter of factly, “Well she’s dying, Heather.”

She’s a stoic one, my mother. While I have to allow every feeling in, circulate, process and then dispel in a very elaborate way she seems to just take things as they are. These things happen she says and she tells me that I should feel lucky to have had grandparents for as long as I did. It’s just words and doesn’t mask that feeling of heartbreak which thrusts every memory so that it presses against my forehead. It gives me a headache to know that she is hurting; her sister is dying, her mother is dying and she still needs to take care of me.

A little over a month ago my older brothers’ mother died. It was unfathomable that their mother died and yet they were ok. Able to walk and talk and function. When I called our father he said that very soon we would go over what to do in the event of his death. And it made me angry – this all makes me so angry – how matter of fact both of my parents can be. It makes me feel like maybe I’m not theirs because of how deeply I feel. But even more, I’m just livid that it happens; that our parents will leave and no one tells you that the mere thought will make your heart tighten and ache and the pain will radiate to every limb but all you can do is cry.