I somehow managed to stay up until midnight last night! I’m definitely getting old though, because it was difficult and I just wanted to go to bed. M and I watched Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper to help keep me awake.

We spent the first day of the new year with my family. My parents’ house has become a gathering place for all special occasions–birthdays, holidays, and the like. My sister and brother-in-law were there, too. We always start out by eating the yummiest of food (Filipino food FOREVER) and then we sit around the dining room table chatting.

Inevitably, the conversation turns to the paranormal, haha. For some reason, my family loves to talk about their ‘personal experiences’ when it comes to ghosts. I always feel left out because I’ve never had a definite experience and the questionable one I did have was most likely something from a dream-induced state. I used to be a HUGE fan of the show Ghost Hunters–I watched faithfully and bought into it, but over time I’ve changed my perspective about the supernatural/paranormal. My family isn’t very scientifically-minded (and that’s not intended to be an insult or anything; it’s just a fact). I’ve become more skeptical as I get older and, in recent years, have been introduced to the awesomeness of people like Carl Sagan. It’s really interesting how drastically our beliefs can change over time.

oh! I forgot to mention that I completed my December blog-a-day! I didn’t miss any days, woohoo! I’m going to try to keep up with my consistent blogging in January. And I’ll hopefully post about more substantive things…maybe. Sometimes I just can’t muster up any deep thoughts. And when I do write, I *still* feel the urge (even after all these years of blogging) to censor myself sometimes…because I think what I really want to write will sound silly or weird or…something. I don’t want to overshare all the time, but I do want to write more honestly, if that makes sense.

I’m off work tomorrow and Tuesday (EXCITE!) and I’m planning on getting some secret knitting done and relaxing in general. I hope your 2012 is off to a great start!

This post was inspired by Manda and Moni.

January

M and I visited the Poe Museum in Richmond, VA.

February

It snowed. A lot! A crazy amount of snow for Virginia Beach, to be honest.

March

I started getting into fitness and losing weight. (sigh) I've definitely fallen off this wagon. I'm kind of sad about it, actually. Maybe I'll get back on Wii Fit in 2012. Also in March: I FINALLY bought a DSLR!

April

I put the new Foo Fighters CD in my car and didn't take it out for MONTHS. Seriously, I've listened to this hundreds of times by now. It's that good.

May

I went to Maryland Sheep & Wool with my knitty girls and kc went with us for the first time! YAY It was sooooo fun!

June

I put my new Nikon to good use and participated in the 7 Days (self-portrait) group on Flickr for the first time. (Unfortunately, I missed the latest round! I'll try to join next cycle.)

July

I turned 31! And after years of work-related stress, I interviewed for a new job...AND GOT IT!

August

Roughest month of all (maybe ever). My then-boss killed himself. I started my new job four days later. Hurricane Irene hit (and spared us, thankfully). Spent way too much time numb, crying, numb (lather, rinse, repeat), thinking about a lot of things I'd never had to consider before.

September

I settled into my new job at the library and finally realized that I was meant to work in a library all along. If only I'd realized this years ago!

October

My nail polish stash grew...and grew...and....I'm still buried under it, actually...

November

I had a very stressful month at work (loooong story...it's not the work, it's certain people). As always, my dogs were there to cheer me up (mopey faces aside).

December

M had a birthday and we also celebrated five years together. I gave myself a break and chose not to knit for family this year, yay me.

I’m pretty sure I’ll do another YIP for 2012 because it’s really been helpful having these photos to jog my memory. 2011 was super emotional for me, in positive and negative ways. What I’m hoping/resolving to do in 2012 is be more productive with my emotions…less bitching, more DOING, if that makes sense.

I’m not going to say that 2011 sucked entirely because I did make at least one very big, positive life change (new job FTW!), so I’m just hoping that 2012 is that much better. May you have an even better 2012, too.

On Thursday the 11th, my boss at work killed himself. He had been struggling with depression for a while; in 2009, I believe, he had to take a couple months off due to a breakdown. I guess this time, it was just too much. Family issues along with enormous work pressure proved to be all too much for him.

This is the first time I’ve known someone who killed themselves and only the second time I’ve known someone who has died. (The first person was my grandmother, back in 2001). Needless to say, I’m not well-versed in matters of death and grief.

I worked for Paul for four years as his assistant. Oddly, though, I never felt that I knew him very well. We had a professional relationship and didn’t talk much about our personal lives. I knew things about him mostly by secondhand knowledge. He had a wife and two daughters. His mother is in ill health. He had two (possibly three?) brothers. And he was always, always stressed about work.

On Thursday, he had a meeting scheduled for 10 AM. When I got to the office at 8:30, he wasn’t in yet. Usually when I arrived, he was already there, but on this day he wasn’t. He came in a little later–probably around 9–but didn’t say much. This wasn’t unusual. He was pretty quiet, compared to some of the other managers. He might say good morning, but some days he didn’t even say that. He always had a million things going through his mind, it seemed, and the majority of them seemed to be related to the business.

A little later, around 9:15 or so, he shut his office door. This also wasn’t unusual; his door was almost always open, but occasionally he closed it to make a personal phone call or talk with someone privately. I looked at the phone to see if he was on it, but didn’t see his line light up. I figured he was on his cell phone. I went to the restroom at that point and by the time I got back to my desk, his door was open and he wasn’t in his office. Later, I found out from my officemate, Liz, that he had opened his door and walked down the hall without telling anyone where he was going. This was unusual; normally, if he was going to leave the building, he’d tell her or someone else in our area where he was going, if I wasn’t at my desk. I figured he was leaving for his meeting; I looked at my computer clock and it said 9:21.

I went about my normal work. The next day (Friday) was to be my last day at this job. I had given my two weeks notice and was incredibly excited to almost be done here. Generally, I’d been in a pretty good mood all week.

Around noon, I checked my cell phone to see if Paul had texted me. He’d do that sometimes, if an issue came up and he wouldn’t be able to make it back to the office or something. His meeting was supposed to be over by noon, but I didn’t have any messages from him. I went to lunch at 12:15 and came back at 1:15.

When I went back to the office, I saw that there was a fire truck in the front parking lot. I wondered if someone was sick; a couple months ago, someone from the accounting department had a seizure and they called 911 and a fire truck showed up with the ambulance. When I got back to my desk, I asked Liz, “What happened this time? There’s a fire truck out front.” She said she didn’t see it, so she didn’t know what was going on. I sat in my seat and opened my email.

About 10 or 15 minutes later, one of the managers, Terri, came down the hall with a couple of the other managers. She went straight to Paul’s office and shut the door. She turned to me and asked if Paul had been in his office at all today. “Yeah,” I said. “He was here earlier…” I was about to explain that I thought he had a meeting, but she cut me off.

“You know what happened, don’t you?” She seemed angry and I didn’t understand why. I shook my head.

“He shot himself. He’s dead in his car.”

My jaw literally dropped and I just stared at her dumbly. I had the fleeting thought of asking her, Are you serious? but thankfully stopped myself from saying that. Surely, she wasn’t joking. One of the other managers, Julian, looked at Liz and me. He spoke up quietly. “You all didn’t know?” I shook my head again.

At some point, I covered my mouth with my hand and just sat there in shock. Liz burst into tears. I can’t remember much of what happened after that–it starts to get really blurry. I remember Liz and me both crying, people talking in the hall, people coming over to talk to us, the police coming over to say something, the police going into Paul’s office, the police taking me into a conference room to take a statement about what Paul had said/done/worn that morning. But mostly, I was–and still am–in shock.

Later, I found out that although Paul had been in therapy, the medication he had been on wasn’t working for him. Two weeks prior, his therapist had asked him to try electroshock therapy. I had trouble understanding this. Seriously, I didn’t think that was still used as a treatment. Shock therapy? What decade is this? Paul said no.

It’s just…I’m of two minds about this whole situation. I keep going back and forth in the freaking stages of grief and I can’t seem to move past denial and anger. Ever since Thursday, I’ve been replaying Terri’s words over and over in my mind. He shot himself. He’s dead in his car. I don’t know why I keep doing this. To torture myself? To remind myself that Paul is really dead? It’s insane. I just saw him that morning and a couple hours later, he was dead. He shot himself in his company car in the front parking lot of our building. It would be poetic if it wasn’t so stupid and sad. That was a new company car, by the way. It’s obviously not anymore. I had just ridden in that car a couple weeks ago when we went to run an errand for work. Did he have the gun with him that day? Could he have shot me? Did he carry it around for a while, or only that morning? But why there? Why not shoot himself at home? There’s something about the way that he did it–in his company car, at work, during work hours–that tells me he wanted us to be the ones to find him, not his family. He wanted us to know that the company was somehow responsible for what he did.

The police sent a couple of chaplains to us at work on Friday morning. I talked with them, but it was all a lot of generic platitudes and they thought it was kind of funny when I said I was “practically an atheist.” (They’d asked if I had a church community, to which I said no.) I know they were just trying to be helpful, but let’s face it–they didn’t know Paul or any of us. They were just doing their job. I appreciated it, but I just couldn’t get on board with everything that they were saying.

I also couldn’t last all day on Friday. It was my last day with the company and my officemates and I had originally planned on going out for lunch. They asked me if I still wanted to go, and part of me did, but the rest of me just couldn’t make it happen. I didn’t even last until lunchtime. I packed up my stuff and left around 11 AM. The big boss (who’d been Paul’s boss) understood. He spoke to me before I left, thanking me for being a good employee but mostly expressing mutual grief.

And it really is a terrible thing, suicide. I don’t understand how someone with children can bring themselves to do it. I don’t have children–well, I have my dogs who seem like my children but I know, I know, it’s not really the same. But I don’t even feel like I could do that. Who’d take care of my dogs? It’s that kind of mentality that I have about it. And then I feel less angry with him, because think of it: how low he must have felt, how depressed he must have been, to know the consequences and still feel that it had to be done. Again, I didn’t know him that well–but I knew enough of him to realize that he probably thought he was saving his family a lot of trouble by getting out of the way. I feel like that’s why he actually went through with it.

All this is speculation, of course. At first, I thought I had contributed to it. As I said, Friday was my last day and I thought somehow that my leaving as his assistant had something to do with it. He hadn’t hired anyone to replace me yet and he was going to have even more work as a result, until he found someone new. Everyone at work was quick to reassure me that I wasn’t at all responsible, but it did cross my mind at first. Now, I know that it was going to happen eventually, whether before I left or after or sometime down the road because he had made up his mind to do it. For him, it was inevitable.

At some point, I’m sure I’ll stop being so angry and pissed off at Paul for taking this way out. It seems, simultaneously, a cowardly and understandable thing to do. It’s shitty because his daughters have lost their father. It’s pitiful because he felt like he had run out of options. Most of all, I just feel tremendous sadness for everyone who knew him, both his family and coworkers, who knew he was struggling but just assumed he was getting things under control. I think we all feel responsible in some way. Ultimately, the choice was his and his alone. But we’re the ones who have to deal with the aftermath.

I keep seeing and hearing these stupid cliches, like he’s “in a better place” or “at peace” or “with God.” Please. You don’t know that and you’re just saying that to make yourself feel better. I hope he’s somehow found peace, but…who really knows? I mean, if there is an afterlife and if it’s so great, why don’t we all kill ourselves now? I mean, really. Spare me the platitudes. Like I said, I’m still trying to work through this anger stuff. It comes and goes; one minute I’m angry with him, then I’m just overwhelmed with sadness and can’t stop crying. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Tomorrow is Monday and I start my new job. I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful that I don’t have to go back to that place and sit across from what used to be Paul’s office and know that I’ll never see him sitting at his desk again. It would be too weird. The company is at a loss about what to do, who to replace him with. It’s business as usual with them. Always is.

I hope that I can dive into my new job and enjoy it. I hope I find friendly faces and challenges (but nothing too exhausting just yet). It’s good to have changes but it’s even better to start something new that you might actually enjoy. I’m going to work in a library, by the way. I think I forgot to mention that. I think I’m really going to like it. I’m not really nervous about the idea of my new job, just excited at the prospect and happy to be going into a career field that’s not marketing or retail.

I’m sorry if any of my comments have come across as harsh in any way, but I think you’ll understand that I’m still sorting through my emotions here. We all are. As I said, it’s the rest of us–the ones he left behind–who have to deal with the aftermath. He really did take the easy way out, didn’t he? I think that makes him a quitter. I know…I wasn’t in his head so I have no idea what he was truly going through. I know. But he did quit and that was selfish and shitty and stupid and his wife is now a widow and his kids don’t have a dad. But then I think–I’ve been depressed before. I’ve never been medicated and definitely never been electroshocked, but I can understand somewhat what it’s like to feel like you’re alone in what you’re going through. I get that, too. I get it. I can see both sides. I just feel like there should have been a better solution here. But that’s kind of irrelevant at this point.

I haven’t seen an obituary yet and I’m not sure if there will be one. I haven’t heard anything about a funeral yet, either, but if there is one I’d like to attend. I think the only thing we can do now is move past this and try to continue living. Really. I’d like to get back to normal (whatever that is) and be happy. I think that will happen sometime, especially with the new job I’m starting.

I’m sorry that Paul lost hope. I’m sorry that he did what he did. I wish he hadn’t shot himself. I wish there had been something or someone who could’ve helped him. I wish it had been enough.

I hope for something better. I hope that his family will be okay eventually. I know, somehow, that this will fade for me and I won’t feel so angry anymore when I think of him. For me, for the rest of us, we will go on. I will do the one thing that he believed he could no longer do–and in the end, the thing he chose not to do.

I’m going to live my life.

So there’s a little story behind how this book was damaged. I bought it new, but I used to be quite a book hoarder when I lived in New Mexico. (I even collapsed a bookcase once with the weight of my books.) But that’s not how this particular book got crushed.

When I was getting divorced, I packed up the majority of my books–most of which I hadn’t read yet, but wanted to hold on to–and shipped them in big boxes to my parents here in Virginia. The boxes made it here largely unscathed, but some of them (like this one) were slightly jostled in the mail and crushed a bit.

When I took this off the shelf last night to start reading it (four years after it was shipped here!), I didn’t realize that it was one of the “bent” ones. I only noticed it when I took off the dust jacket. Anyway, it’s a really long way of saying that I’m sure there’s something symbolic here. Slightly damaged, but otherwise in great condition. Not unlike myself.

(btw, the book is Light on Snow by Anita Shreve.)

Today would have been my grandma’s 90th birthday.

And I can definitively say that my life in 2011 thus far is way, way, way better than it was in 2006. Thank goodness for that.

Also: it’s 4 AM; why the hell am I still awake?!

- Even though I complain almost daily about it, I’m thankful that I have a job that pays my bills.
- Even though we’ve had some bumps in the road recently with unexpected expenses, I’m thankful for our house and cars.
- Sometimes they annoy me, but my parents always check up on me and they really do care.
- M is the best and I’m so happy he’s in my life.

And on a…less serious note:
- It’s kind of a pain to work on a deadline, but I really enjoy knitting holiday gifts for my loved ones. I’ve got almost two projects finished and have time to get the rest done before next month.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: