Anything Can Be A Sign If You Want It To Be/On Grief and Grieving

I’ve been taking a while to collect my thoughts because today has been an absolutely incredible day. But yesterday was awful, so by comparison, any day is going to be an absolutely incredible day. Yesterday started with finding out about the death of a much beloved improvisor, and so much sadness surrounding everyone he knew. That was followed by the mediocrity (but still incredibly painful act) of pulling a muscle in my neck so that I could barely move my sad dumb head. I called out of work and stayed home most of the day, trying to make sense of the sometimes but all too frequent bastard of a world we live in. Then I played some mourning pinball (because I could literally only look down until I had enough whiskey, bless), accidentally busted 5 tables (sorry…totally not on purpose, it was a rough night), and went home to sleep off my rage so that I could be a bright and beautiful flower for my meeting with the school on Saturday morning. It was the first night I slept entirely through in a long time.

I woke up before my alarm and just laid in bed for a few minutes. I guess I expected to feel similarly to a kid on Christmas morning, but I just felt bad, inside and out. I didn’t have a hangover, but the booze wore off and my neck felt broken. It was dark outside and I was cold and sad still. But then my alarm went off and it made me laugh. I got a new phone a few weeks ago, so I updated all of my Legend of Zelda alerts. My alarm is now the Game Over sound & song from the original game. I excitedly told a friend about that a while ago and he said “Well that’s depressing” but it hadn’t hit me until he mentioned that, that yeah…it’s really depressing. And sometimes when you’re depressed, you laugh-cry about really dumb things.

I listened to the alarm for a little while and thought about staying home until my brain started screaming through my half-asleepness that this was neither the time nor the place for that bullshit, and I needed to get up and GO.

I showered and got dressed all business-like, made breakfast, did my hair and make up, and headed out to the car rental place. Everyone was super nice and happy and my car was ready and warm right as I got there. The radio was playing “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” by the Clash as I got in. The Clash are one of my favorite bands, and Combat Rock was my first album of theirs. In fact, the radio station was doing a whole show devoted to bands who had their first big-label record from the year I was born! Totally had to be a sign, right? The car was awesome and fast, I had water and chewing gum, nothing could possibly break my stride.

Traffic moved well, but I realized around 9:48 that I was going to be a bit late for the 10:00am meeting. I called the Vice-President, Stephanie, to let her know that I was about 5-10 minutes behind schedule, and she said that was fine. She asked if I wanted some coffee, and I said yes, that would be great (I ❤ coffee always and forever!). She sounded so pleasant and I felt really good about everything.

About 25 minutes later, I still hadn’t found my exit. In fact, I’d passed through Elgin and was coming up on Lake Forest. That wasn’t right! I overshot by waaaay too much! When I first called Stephanie, I seriously had just passed a sign telling me I was about 12 miles away! I’d been cruising (ok…speeding…I miss driving!!!) along for a while, but my exit never came up. I called her again to apologize and let her know that I was turning around. Again, she was so incredibly pleasant and told me to take my time. I was so embarrassed, as I pride myself on being on time, if not early! I told her that I didn’t want to waste her time and really appreciated her kindness. She was so nice, but I just figured this was where all of the positive signs and good ju-ju ended.

I got to the school about 85 minutes after my scheduled appointment. I felt like the biggest dingus in the world, but I freshened my lipgloss, grabbed my things, and walked into the building. Suddenly, I was home.

Not home in the sense that I was in a place that felt like *my* home, but in the sense that I was exactly where I needed to be. Stephanie greeted me with a warm handshake and a huge smile. I almost hugged her because I was so overwhelmed with joy simply to be there. She took my coat, handed me a mug of hot coffee, and the tour began.

The school is literally, in all sense of the word, perfect. I gushed and babbled the whole time, like a teeny bopper meeting a celebrity. I said the phrase “THAT IS SO COOL!” so many times that I probably should have to pay some sort of toll or tax. But it was SO. COOL. I expressed how I wanted to focus on restorative art and alternative funerals, and she told me about different classes the school offers and workshops for once I finish. She gave me numerous resources to follow up on this year, from networking events to the books I can start buying before school starts, some conferences that will be coming up, and a few funeral-specific magazines and websites to check out. At the end of the tour, she cleaned out my coffee mug and gave it to me as a souvenir. I definitely teared up and almost started crying as though she’d handed me an Oscar or Nobel Peace Prize. It was…SO COOL.

Coffee & Chemicals

It looks like this is completely doable as long as I stick to a fairly strict budget and game plan this year, which I can certainly do. I have to do this. If I don’t, I will regret it for the rest of my life, and I refuse to be that person. The only thing I need to get over is saying that what I’m about to do is weird. It’s not. It’s necessary. I often think about things people said to me when I worked in the morgue which completely caught me off guard and fueled my constant prefacing of everything about my choice to be “I know this is weird, but” (those things included dudes being super grossed about my day job whilst on dates (and sometimes seriously pulling the “Oh…I have to go. My friend is…sick” move), people making general comments about how they wouldn’t want to be touched by my warm and alive, perfectly normal hands after knowing they’d been inside a cold dead human, and creepy question after creepy question about my “relations” with the deceased. Folks. Come on. Don’t be gross). It’s not weird. I know that people think it’s gross or sad or strange but it’s not, and I’m much better prepared to defend it now and I ask you, if you’re like “yeah no Jessica you’re super gross” right now: Is it weird to become a midwife or a doula? Is it weird to work in Labor & Delivery? It’s culturally acceptable to talk about birth til you’re blue in the face. Birth is a miracle and death is scary and horrible and weird. But we all have to go through both of them, regardless of whether or not we want to. It sucks, my stars IT REALLY SUCKS. It sucks so much and often, it’s not fair and it’s not welcome and it can be gross for sure. But it’s going to happen and it’s not scary. I promise. It’s the unknown, whatever happens afterward, that’s the scary part. Maybe this isn’t helping…again, kind of in a weird mental space right now.

These past few days, I’ve been thinking about grief quite a bit. We grieve over more than just death. Anything that’s associated with loss evokes grief. There’s no wrong way to grieve, but it’s so important that people be wise and conscious about it. Reach out to people when you need to. We all forget to do that sometimes. What started me on my thoughts of grief was actually finding a few shorts essay I wrote about my big bad break up after I moved to Chicago. One was about how anyone could have charted when the decline in our relationship began based on the way we played video games together (he always sacrificed me in order to get a higher score and more lives), but I was too slow on the uptake to realize it. The other was about how, about two months before we even had the “We need to talk”-talk, I made a break up playlist without even knowing it. I’ve been grieving the loss of that relationship for over two years now and have honestly only recently realized that I could have been spending my time doing many more important things, like learning a different language or, you know, not giving a shit about someone who treated me like crap, anymore.

Regardless of the wound, time won’t heal it. Time will just turn the pain into something else. Time might make them feel as though it is less and less numb, but the scars are always there. You either look at them and let them define you negatively, or you wear them with a fondness for what once was, and marvel at how they’ve changed you.

This post was kind of all over the place. Sorry ’bout that.

2015! 2015! Wait…2015?!

Welp, we’re just over a week into 2015 and it’s showing a LOT of promise thus far. So much so, in fact, that it’s slightly terrifying. But in a good way? I don’t know. This past week has been a rollercoaster of emotions, mostly positive! Just very strange.

I feel like I’m stuck in between several different worlds, and it’s not exactly concerning, but it’s a strange feeling. Kind of, I guess, like how being a superhero might feel, minus the literal ass-kicking. I wake up and go to work, just like everyone else. All I can think about is school, pinball, writing, and how, HOW, in the span of five days I keep losing my freakin’ Ventra card (that’s for public transit, non-Illinois readers). Like, I’m clumsy and forgetful but…what the hell?! Is my coat pocket eating them in order to keep me warm this winter?! BTW, congratulations to whomever picked up a Ventra card with “Riker” sharpie’d at the top of it. That card *was* my Number One 😦

Work is kind of tricky right now. Sometimes I feel like I’m lying to them simply by being there. At this point I don’t believe it makes sense to leave of course, and I certainly feel like I have my place in the office, but I feel like a short-timer even though I’m not planning on school til next year. Not only that, I kind of do have to lie sometimes when talking about next year and my future with the company. It’s so strange; when I started there, everything was a complete mess and I wanted nothing more than to run and never look back. Now though, I feel a responsibility to the office (of course, mostly because I work there) and so there’s a little bit more at stake because I’m not just the “new girl” anymore. I mean shoot, that guy who called me Jennifer for five months finally learned my actual name!

On Saturday, I’m heading out to Wheeling to check out my potentially future school. I’ve been referring to it as Death School and I hope people don’t think that’s callous. I always worry that folks’ll think I’m too glib about such a serious subject, but then again, most people familiar with me just get it? I definitely believe that, out of all of the things I’ve done in my life, my background in comedy will be my strongest asset in venturing back into death. Now, please don’t mistake that to mean I’m going to try to make people laugh. On the contrary (but I mean, if it happens, it happens). I believe that I was rather ill-equipped to have had careers with death in my early 20’s because I didn’t know how to turn off serious-mode when I left work. Through improv, I’ve developed my listening skills much better and have an easier time reading people in difficult situations. Empathy is something I’ve often been told I have, but my own experiences with death in the past decade have sharpened that quality greatly. I also know when to shut the fuck up. That’s an important skill no have no matter your profession.

I’m slowly compiling a growing list of questions to ask the Program Director/Vice President when I meet with her on Saturday morning. I know that this is a field in which I can be incredibly successful, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about what my time in school would be like. Sure, in my head I’m thinking I’m going to move to Wheeling, get an apprenticeship right off the bat, go to school and work hard, but I don’t know how realistic it is to get an apprenticeship that quickly. What if it makes more sense to stay in Chicago and get a car instead of moving to Wheeling? What if it’s impossible to work in a funeral home  while I’m going to school and I struggle to find an apprenticeship after I graduate? I don’t think I realized at the time how lucky I was to get jobs in a funeral home and a morgue (a fucking MORGUE…and believe it or not, those are tough jobs to get as you’ll see evidenced by the fact that, for the last seven years, I’ve been working in tech, education, and real estate but could devote several scrap books to hospital rejection letters, if I were into scrap booking). I wish I could redeem some sort of “Hey you were on the right track but you kinda fucked up” coin to get jobs like those again.

But that’s not how life works, and what’s done is done. The most important thing is that I have this strong and focused desire to work in a capacity where I facilitate a comforting and helpful environment to assist humans, be they living or dead, through the end of a life.

Simply knowing that leads to another odd feeling. After spending so much time trying to understand my purpose on this planet and going through some of the most amazingly wonderful and absolutely gut-wrenching experiences simply trying to answer that question, I…answered it. It’s overwhelming, in the best way.

One thing that I didn’t expect was the incredible amount of support from my friends. That’s not to say that they aren’t supportive, but I don’t know, I’m not sure how to explain it. I expected a “Cool” or “Wow that’s neat” or high-five or whatever, sure. Ok. I forgot how many people knew me back in my “Deathica” days. The people who I told about my dream funeral home or how I wanted to teach a class to help everyone prepare for their deaths. The people who knew about my wanting to pursue taxidermy as a hobby because it just felt like a thing I’d be good at since I missed working in a morgue. The people who weren’t freaked out when I said stuff like “I miss working in a morgue.”  It’s not that I forgot about them exactly, but I didn’t know they were all just waiting to champion the heck out of my dream once I realized I was ready. This isn’t “just” a new career path. This is gonna be my life.

I’ll get calls at all hours of the night that I need to pick up a body, from someone’s home or a hospital. And it’s not just a body. It’s someone’s parent, sibling, child. Someone’s best friend. Someone’s greatest love. Someone’s only other person in this entire world. I’ll be the person who guides loved ones though a sea of commerce to try to make sense of something which often doesn’t make sense. I’ll see these people after the fact, in passing at the store or a bar or somewhere, and they’ll feel infinitely sadder once they see me because of how we know each other, regardless of whether or not it was a “beautiful service”. I will become eternally creepy to small children, which is a pretty serious goal of mine. I will act as a human representation of Death, regardless of whether I’m wearing a suit & heels or t-shirt, skirt & Chucks. And I’m more than ok with that.

Saturday morning, I will come face to face with my future. It took a lot to get to this point, and it’s not going to be all cake and rainbows from hereon out, but it’ll be pretty damn close.

I’m Weird, You’re Weird, Just Let It Get Weird Guys

I’ve been feeling rather terrible and unlike myself for quite some time. Since I moved to Chicago, my life has changed rather dramatically, and it’s no secret that I’ve been particularly unhappy, though it might be and perhaps I don’t realize it because I don’t want to seem weird or silly or annoying. I often feel completely out of control, and I try to make sure it never shows. Or maybe it does but everyone has been nice enough not to say anything.  Regardless, I’ve been in a personal crisis of life for the past three years. I have spent a lot of time wondering what does it all mean? What is hate? What is love? What am I doing here? Why are you here? Why are we here? And what are we doing, really? What are we doing, but biding our time, and for what? What drives me anymore? What do I want out of life? What do I need? What is my passion?

Someone asked me that last question about two weeks ago at a party. We were all mostly tipsy and I was talking to a nice woman about theatre. I clumsily told her I was a writer (and a friend of mine both encouraged and confirmed this word, writer, to her. He called me a playwright! I must’ve looked concerned as lately I feel like a huge phoney, hence the confirmation from him). She smiled and stated that everyone must have a passion that they always focus on in their work and she asked me what my passion was, then proceeded to list a few. “Death, love—” I stopped her. “Death.  Loss.”

As a child, I was obsessed with death. In particular, what would happen to me after I died. I do not come from a religious family, so I knew I’d never have a big churchy ceremony or be buried in a grave yard. I didn’t want to go in a casket. I didn’t want to die. Where would my soul go? How would I get it back, and when I came to retrieve it, how would I know it was mine?

I went to my first funeral at the tender age of five. It was my mother’s aunt’s funeral. I don’t remember much except that my mother made me go up to the casket to pay my respects to a woman I didn’t remember meeting. I didn’t know what to do, and it freaked my shit out, as you’d expect. Over the years, I would go on to attend probably about a dozen more of these affairs, for other relatives, both old a young, then those for friends of the family. I remember one funeral in particular, for my Great Uncle Nick, where I slowly realized that there could be an answer in my curiosities. I was sitting with some cousins and we noticed a funeral director open a door and walk into a stairway, sure to close the door tightly behind him. We all just stared at each other in wonder until someone mentioned that down this staircase was probably where they kept the bodies. I’m fairly certain this was around the time of My Girl, a movie with which many young girls were obsessed at the time. Not only did it star one of my childhood crushes, Dan Aykroyd*, but a majority of the film took place in a funeral home (IN WHICH DAN AYKROYD WORKED OMFG).

We were all too creeped out to actually explore anything of course, plus we probably would have been beaten to high heaven by our parents if we tried anything that intensely bizarre, but we certainly thought about it quite a bit and discussed it at great length for a group of 7-10 year-olds.

Then came the most important night of my life: I believe I was 21 at the time, working in a Petco and living on Long Island with my parents. It was not great, so I decided to move to Raleigh and live with my former college roommate. I was applying for an insane amount of jobs, hoping to have something lined up before I got there, and I came across a listing for a sales person at a funeral home. I knew there was no way in hell that I could do it because I’m certainly not a great sales person, and basically I was a dirty punk kid anyhow, but I went for it. Eventually I got a call back from the sales manager, and four interviews later, I was offered a job as the receptionist at the funeral home.

Over time, I became really good friends with one of the funeral directors, and he let me help with embalmings on occasion. I’d clean people up and break rigor mortis just like he showed me, and when it came time for the embalming fluid to replace the blood, I’d help massage the bodies to assist in blood circulation.

IT. WAS. AWESOME.

Eventually I ended up moving back to New York though, where I unsuccessfully tried to continue working for funeral homes. I literally got laughed out of one after the other. It was not great, but I did eventually get a job working in a hospital. Nothing fancy or death related, but it was something!

A few years later, I returned to Raleigh and started working in the funeral home again, but this time as a funeral director’s assistant and part-time administrative assistant. I’d get death certificates signed, drive bodies to and (later) from the crematorium, help set up and complete services, wash the hearse, push caskets around during funerals, deliver flowers, dress bodies, help with hair and make up, stuff like that. I quite enjoyed it and had a chance to work with several different directors to learn more about their styles.

There’s a fun amount of theatrics to the whole thing, the actual funeral service. Obviously the deceased is the star, and the funeral director must make sure that everything happening during the service focuses on the star. A place for everything, and everything in its place. I had that all down pat, having worked in film and some theatre at that point. There was only one part of the whole deal where I had trouble: speaking to grieving families.

Now at this point, I’m 25 years old. I’m working part time at the funeral home in the mornings. I’m working in a hospital in the afternoons/evenings, splitting my time between the pathology lab and the morgue where I assisted with and performed autopsies. Almost 12 hours of each day were devoted to death. I’d leave funeral services on weekends when I was on call for autopsy at the hospital. It was a lot and it became difficult to switch gears from Empathetic Jessica to Scientific Jessica. It wasn’t being around death that would depress me, but knowing too much about these people’s lives and everything they were leaving behind.

Eventually I quit working at the funeral home and was only working at the hospital. I took a job working nights in a grocery store so that my interaction with the living were more mundane and filled with happy produce. Death and I were back on good terms and it was awesome! I stopped drinking so much. But the nightmares (and oh, how I was having terrible nightmares) wouldn’t go away. And, unfortunately at that time, quite a few of my friends were dying. I was on a bad streak.

Eventually I went back to school full time in hopes of becoming a doctor. That did not end up happening, but I fell into comedy and fast forward several years to now. Friday to be exact. November 14th, 2014. I had an epiphany! Well…I revisited an epiphany, I should say.

Shortly after moving to Chicago, I learned that I was now in close proximity to an excellent school of Mortuary Sciences. I’d toyed with the idea of becoming a funeral director back in my assistant days, but I wasn’t sure I could really handle it. I tried to push it out of my mind but still thought about it all the time. I started developing a “How to prepare for death” class to teach folks what they should have in order before the Big Day, through a site like Dabble or something. I would gaze longingly into funeral homes that I’d pass on the street, no matter if they catered to humans or their animal companions. I missed it all so much.

I know how weird that might sound but if you know me (or even if you’ve just read a few of my blog posts), perhaps you understand. I’ve never been a very by-the-books person when it comes to life, and one of the things that has ever really made sense to me, moved me, engulfed my brain, is death. How it happens, how people perceive it, how we deal with it as a culture. It’s all just incredible to watch, and one of my favorite subjects. But it certainly turns people off at times when I start talking about it. It made dating incredibly awkward, when I was still working in the industry. But I digress!

On Friday, I was reading through (WARNING: DO NO CLICK IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE THINGS YOU CANNOT UNSEE, DEATH-WISE, AS THIS POST INCLUDES PICTURES OF THE DEAD AND THERE ARE SUTURES AND SOME WOUNDS and a breast) this post. The general post, for anyone not interested in clicking (and that is fine! There’s no reason you should ever have to click on anything you don’t want to, and the processing of death works differently for everyone!) is a series of photographs of body preparation in Denmark. The blurbs under the photographs are a bit strange but beautifully poetic. As I scrolled down the post to examine the piece, I felt a pang of guilt that I never pursued my original “Jessica in her 20’s” dream of becoming a funeral director. It’s not the reaction you’d think to have, but seeing the tenderness and care put into preparing the bodies reminded me of how protective and cautious I was when working with someone’s loved one.

Fun fact: I would talk to them, so they knew what was going on. It seemed only natural. I started doing that the first time I met a dead person that I didn’t know. One weekend when I was still the receptionist of the funeral home, I worked a little overtime but needed to check on a body in one of the viewing rooms before I left, at the request of the funeral director. I was so scared and felt like I was interrupting the man, so I opened the door, said “Excuse me?” and introduced myself. It helped me get past some of my own fears, and then it just became habit. When I worked in the morgue, sometimes the pathologists would walk in on me while I was talking to the person. One pathologist laughed and asked why I was explaining an evisceration to the deceased. I explained that I didn’t want the patient to think I was murdering them, if their soul or whatever was there, too. For the record, we never had like “how was your day?” conversations and I didn’t make them speak or anything like that. I simply explained the what and why of the autopsies, who I was, etc. Occasionally I did apologize to them for how they died or any awkward poking I needed to do, and I would say “good-bye”, in case you’re curious.

A bit more digression, and then I’m going to wrap this up because I should sleep: I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles (Burbank, more specifically), where I spent several days kicking it live with one of the best friends a girl could have, my awesome friend Amber. I planned this trip almost two months ago, knowing that I needed to get out of Chicago and clear my head. I wanted so desperately to really figure out what the fuck I am doing with my life, and why everything in my life feels so incredibly wrong. Friday was a game changer! Seeing that Denmark post, feeling that pang, I knew I needed to make a change, and I went to ello (Remember ello, guys? GO BACK TO IT. TRUST ME.) and posted this:

“I leave tomorrow. I made a v. big life decision today. I’ll be back in Chicago on Wednesday night, and then I have one year to make it happen. If it doesn’t happen, it’s not the worst thing ever, but if it does, I bet it’ll be the best thing ever. Theatre and stuff has been a fun detour, and I’ll continue to write, probably even more now since I’ve made enough contacts who might be interested in directing things I wrote or whatever, but it’s time to start working toward becoming a funeral director. I can’t fight it anymore. I miss working in the industry and I’m always telling people that they need to reach for their dreams. When I try to think about what it is that I really want more than anything, aside from your run of the mill “someone who loves me” type of shit, being a funeral director or working with death in some capacity is where my passion really lies.

It’s weird, I guess, but it’s also not. I’m most comfortable around death. I’m a lot more patient and understanding and capable around it. It’s because of death that I’m better at speaking with the living. Death is something Iv’e always cared about very deeply.

Everything I’ve done up until this moment is also great, but I miss working with death more than I can express. There’s an odd familiarity about it which I love and understand more than anything.

I have 12 months to figure out how to get back to school and make this happen. Technically I just need to figure out the financial situation and apply to a school that’s about 45 minutes from here. So it’ll be 12 months of saving money and talking to the school or banks about loans.

Everything after that will be a piece of cake.”

I’ve been feeling like myself again since Friday afternoon. Effortlessly myself, anyhow. I’m calm. I’m confident. I made a decision that is probably the best decision of my life, and I can’t wait to get started.

*Not even a joke. Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Steve Martin…my first major crushes as a sweet young weirdo, and I still love them all.