I suppose the initial spurt of creativity that brought this blog into being has lost its steam, and this URL will soon point to just one more member in the piles of little dead blogs that have gathered like old sea foam in the abandoned corners of the Internet. That's fine.
So I'll use it now to write something unimportant. There's something more important I want to write, but I can't seem to grow it sufficiently into the full-fledged thought it ought to be.
Just a general update, I feel pretty different now. I'm not only definitely not Catholic, but can say the word "atheist" and feel that it's true about me. I seem to be some sort of "hopeful atheist" -- it seems there is little to no evidence that God exists, but I continue to hope I'm wrong.
Things with my family did not heal. Either we will find a way to a new relationship somehow, or we'll stay on two different planets, dealing with each other politely. I think the latter may be the case for a very long time.
Recently, I gave the eulogy for my Dad that I really wanted to give. I wish everyone could hear it, because I want everyone to know the gift my Dad gave me in the form of a concept of God that allowed me to feel almost infinitely safe in the world, and how hard he worked to give me that gift.
After I did that, according to a certain, older version of me, I completed my reason to live and could feel it. According to the strongly-developed paradigm that had kept me behind the grate, after losing Carmel, I had felt that my only purpose left in life must be to bury my parents and die. I've already failed to accompany my mother to the grave, inasmuch as I'm dead to her and there seems to be no path toward getting her medicated. (I even abandoned my cat: Mom finally ran out of patience maintaining him and sent him to a farm.) That left Dad, who was still taking comfort in me. And having buried him -- says the old Kathleen -- there's nothing left to do but die.
Thankfully, I gave up on her assessment of things. I logged off that profile by permitting myself to consider my dismissal an obedience to go seek joy in the world despite my own preference. This gave me the option to continue to live, and even work hard to keep growing in better and richer happiness, just for the heck of it.
Religion and religious sentiments, things designed to pull me down toward a more traditionally mystical mindset, can sometimes seem like a lullaby crafted to ease me into a sleep that would never end, like Temple Grandin's invention for soothing cows on the way to slaughter. Not always, I think; I'm not sure.
Often I can retrieve a sense of death being alright and quite natural, and not necessarily feel like I'm in a freefall toward the void when considering it. But I do feel the loss of being able to believe wholeheartedly in the Resurrection, and its effect of removing of the primal fear of death. It's back; or at least, it's something I have to battle with in a more honest way, in a way that makes me feel much less powerful. But the honesty is refreshing, and makes me hope I may actually be better prepared for facing the real thing.
