Again, my apologies for a lack of blog entries lately. I have lots of topics on my whiteboard here for when I feel that I can resume a normal blogging schedule, but that might not be for a while because there’s still so much going on here in the aftermath of Dad’s death. Just as a quick update on that, I had blogged earlier that the preliminary cause of Dad’s death was determined to be a stomach aneurysm, but when we got his death certificate shortly after that, the cause of death there was listed as blood clots in his lungs. Complicating matters is the fact that the coroner’s report is still not done yet, even though Dad was cremated two weeks ago; this doesn’t seem logical to me, but I’m guessing that this is just one of those things where I’m basing things on what I’ve seen on television dramas like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and not on any real-life experience.

As a lead-in to what I’m about to say, and at the risk of sounding like I would dare to brag about something like this, when the actual medical emergency hit on the 23rd, I clicked over into Crisis Mode, that rare state I achieve where I manage to stop being absent-minded, stop screwing the small and big things up, take charge and do a damn good job of it. Just like I was the one to get the family out of the house and call 911 and all that when we had the fire here in 2001, I was the one to call 911 when we needed to, I got the paramedics and others marshalled through the house, called Heather and Mark, coordinated everything, and drove behind the ambulance that took Dad to the hospital. After we were told of his death, I likewise got the family banded together and helped everyone piece together all of the things we needed to take care of.

With the fire, though, there came a point where I could switch out of Crisis Mode, and that was fairly soon in the process. Once the family was huddled together in the van in front of our house and the fire rigs were getting the blaze under control, I could afford to relax a little, in part because the family was safe and secure (and that was all that really mattered at that point), and in part because when it came to the upper-level planning stuff, those were things that Dad had to take care of, and he was quite capable of taking care of them. This is different, though; Dad’s not here, and even though Mom has to take care of the upper-level things, she needs to rely a lot on Heather and Mark and myself to take care of them. We’re far enough along in the process here to know that we don’t have to worry about anyone swooping in and kicking us out of the house or any of that, at least for a good long while, but at the same time there are still an awful lot of unresolved questions and a tremendous amount of business to take care of. I’m not feeling the same panic I was feeling in the hours before and after Dad’s death, but at the same time it feels like I haven’t really gotten out of Crisis Mode yet.

The two things that have gotten me through here are writing (for myself) and food. Writing isn’t an issue here, but I’ve been off-diet for a while now — I tried going back on-diet last week but my heart wasn’t in it, and with both Dad’s birthday and mine this week I don’t think now is the right time to get back on it — but at the same time I haven’t been taking good care of myself. Granted, there are far worse things I can do to my body than eat bad foods (and don’t think I haven’t been tempted to do some of them), but I feel like there’s an underlying problem with me still being unable to get out of Crisis Mode here. I really don’t know what to do here, and in a lot of ways I’m worried about relaxing too much because, as I said, there is still a lot of work to do. Still, I don’t feel that good about myself right now, and I don’t know what to do to fix that.