As some of you may know or have noticed, I was out of the studio (and offline, most of the time) all of last week. A family friend died a week ago yesterday, and while I initially planned to go back to work after the funeral, I found myself too exhausted and sad to focus, and ended up taking the entire week off to sit shiva and let myself start to recover physically and emotionally.
Mourning is not linear. I expected to cry the most at the funeral, but I somehow held it together that day, despite being asked to sing during the funeral. Instead, grief hit me the hardest on Thursday, and left me disoriented all weekend. I spent yesterday alternately doing chores that had been neglected all week - grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking - and reading, trying to get back to a place where I could focus on work.
Today is a different sort of disorientation: summer vacation has started, and instead of settling into my work day after driving my daughter to school, I'm trying to juggle work and an extremely chatty six-year-old who seems incapable of remembering that I've asked her to work on her own projects for more than about thirty seconds at a time.
I know I managed to do this last year, somehow; I'll get into the swing of it again soon enough, I suspect. But for now, I'm letting myself move slowly. A pair of earrings, a blog post, a commission, some work emails, paying bills, guitar practice - those are my goals today. Tomorrow maybe I'll be focused enough to get us to the park for a while before the worst of the heat sets in, to work under a tree while Claire plays.
Life somehow goes on. This too shall pass.
