A month of #WeblogPoMo2024

A quick roundup of my month of concerted blogging for #WeblogPoMo2024.

My goal for #WeblogPoMo2024 was 31 posts. I knew I wouldn't stick to a rigid one-per-day cadence, as we originally had three trips totaling 15 days away planned for the month (in fact, we were supposed to be en route to a campsite this morning).

But of course, our plans changed considerably when my dad was rushed to the hospital on May 8, and we then spent 5 torturous days in the ICU as he succumbed, finally passing away on the 13th.

This is my first major death, and it's been tougher than I expected. Losing a parent should be tough no matter the circumstances. But I've been the primary person responsible for managing...well...his entire life these last four years. That has added to the pain, the second-guessing and guilt, the general daze you find yourself in. Or I imagine it has. It's not that I couldn't imagine life without him—he was 89 and already survived in-home hospice once—but the current rawness is a bit different than I expected. In many ways, this was my primary job, and it's hard not to feel like you could have done better.

I will very much be happy to get my life back, as his needs forced us to drop everything to help, effectively ending the business I was launching at the time, rewriting the finances of three different family households, and dominating our life plans. But we're still in the grieving phase, and the holy-shit-there-is-a-lot-do task list that we've been saddled with, exacerbated by a complex series of divorce-ordered shifts of legal benefits and such. Thank goodness my wife has taken the reigns on that stuff.

I haven't blogged regularly in years, so given the events, you'd expect that I'd be done with #WeblogPoMo2024 after that first week. But instead, I've soldiered on, perhaps as an occasional distraction, allowing me to avoid dealing with a newly emerging reality.

Or perhaps it was to preserve some semblance of self-efficacy—something I was choosing to do, proactively, instead of simply responding to sudden and random bouts of tears, or being forced to complete stressful tasks I really, really didn't want to face. I'm not sure, and probably won't ever know.

But no matter why, I posted and posted. Most topics I started writing about were abandoned—no, we'll generously call it delayed instead—after several paragraphs, and new topics were substituted. I had a dozen or so items that I had really wanted to write this month, many of them major rewrites of existing parts of my website that were sorely in need of improvement.

In the end, though, I mostly wrote new pieces, each of them a small sliver of the larger message I had originally wanted to convey. But at least I did them. At least there's a flag in the ground, a draft I can continue to work on, flesh out, revise and maybe even perfect. One day...

Overall, I'm calling the month a clear success. My main hope wasn't really the words I wrote and how I feel about them. But just that I was doing it again—posting, regularly, on my own blog. And, yeah, I clearly succeeded in that. That's fun. Again.

So thank you to Apple Annie for getting this started, and especially to everyone who participated. I very much enjoyed reading everyone's posts and I discovered a whole bunch of new people to follow through the hashtag. And, I also got to write some stuff, that at least a few of you all read, and I appreciate the inspiration and camaraderie that comes with a simple little challenge like #WeblogPoMo2024.

And—ta da!—that's my last post of the challenge. 🙌

[31/31] for #WeblogPoMo2024
[33/100] for #100DaystoOffload