The Last Stage of Loss?
Last night I had one of those "your loved one isn't actually dead!" dreams, but about my cat.
I used to have them a lot about my stepdad that passed away many years ago, and I had a handful about my boss that sadly ended his own life a decade ago.
I had the first dream in a very long time (as far as I can recall) about my cat Hobbes last night. He was suddenly not dead, and I could hold him in my arms. It was a very sweet dream.
I don't think I've had more than a handful of dreams about him, ever. Ironically the only other ones I can somewhat remember were from when he was younger, and my mind was expressing fears about him passing away, because he was just so dear to me.
But I'm thinking that maybe the "your loved one is suddenly and unexpectedly not dead" dream is possibly the last stage of grief.
It's your heart reminding you: not that they are gone, but that they were there, and how much they meant to you. Just as you start to move on (?!???), your heart draws you back; not out of cruelty, but out of love.
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 7
Keep Buggering On
Well, today is the last day of Writing Month, and this is my 20th blog post of 20, which is what I signed up for.
My last post was a lot more involved and time-consuming than I expected, so I wanted to end on a high note, with a fairly …
Read More
I Miss Palette Rotation
Background
In the halcyon days of 16-bit microcomputers, there was a computer graphics technique used by many demos and some games known as Palette Rotation, Palette Shifting, Palette Animation, or Color Cycling.
Computers weren't fast enough to change the entire contents of screen memory in graphics mode (even relatively low …
Read More
Love is a choice
I was going to go in a different direction for tonight's blog post (thanks to the help of some kind fedifriends), but while starting on that post, I felt like I needed to revive a blog post idea from a few weeks ago first.
A month and four days ago …
Read More
How to love your neighbor...
...in the midst of... all this
You're driving to work and you see them. A bunch of people holding up signs in favor of the human being (if they can be truly described as such!) that you loathe the most on the entire earth.
Your blood boils.
You air out …
Read More
My Socratic Sign
In Part I, I listed several things/places/events that felt magical to me in my life. In this article, I will discuss the most recent one, which I refer to as my "Socratic Sign."
Life, Rebooted
At 40 years old, I found myself without a job and without the …
Read More
Magical Moments
This article is written based on a prompt I shared with a friend a couple weeks ago. You can my article from that "round-robin" prompt exercise here.
Since neither of my fedifriends have written their prompts yet, I'm actually borrowing the idea I gave Amin to write:
I'm going to …
Read More
A Grief Exchanged
The working title of my previous post was, "A Grief Exchanged."
I couldn't quite make the title work in my head, so I abandoned it for "Adoption," which still works well.
I'm re-claiming that title for this post, because I can make more sense of where I was going with …
Read More
Adoption
I wrote six months ago about the process of mourning and also my struggle to find another cat to adopt.
There were a couple times that I had visited with a cat at a shelter and slowly warmed up to the possibility of adopting them, only to find that the …
Read More
Freedom
Content Warning: this is all coming from a fairly Christian worldview, and so may seem a bit like proselyting to those from other traditions and beliefs. I'm just putting out what I'm mulling over, so as always, you're welcome to read it, or wait for another nerdy UNIXy post a …
Read More