Chapter 60: Emotional Overload
November 22, 2025
Today was a little too much for me, what with the day being bookended by two situations of such pain and sadness.
This morning got off to a rather frightening start when I thought I lost mom’s obituary. It all started when I got a recommendation last week to change how I’m hosting my company website. The transfer of contents from one provided to the other was easy enough – but I had completely forgotten that I had created a page (that obviously wasn’t part of my client navigation path) to showcase a story about mom’s life and several key photographs on the day she died. It was my way of giving a massive “screw you” to the death industrial complex after dad and I saw the prices of what a tiny little funeral notice costs to run in the newspaper (Good Grief).
I would often look at that page over the past year – even though there is a sad ending to the story, I got some comfort from knowing that I’d been able to share who mom was with the world. In fact, I was even a little impressed at how well I did with the storytelling given that at the time I did it, I was in a complete haze and my heart had just been broken into a million pieces.
Anyway. With the focus on migrating my company’s business content over to the new service provider, I completely forgot about mom and when I clicked on a message in an old link later in the day and saw that dreaded “404 error” message, I thought I was going to completely melt down.
What followed next was quite the disparate tale of two companies’ approaches to customer service. I didn’t know if the “from” or the “to” people would be able to help me out – and I was crying pretty uncontrollably. Funny how the how approach repeatedly telling me to “calm down” didn’t work – honestly, is there ever a time in the history of the universe that anyone has been told to calm down responded with, “Gee – you’re right, maybe I should take a deep breath…” Fortunately, the other company – the one that actually helped me to recover the content was really amazing. Made me feel bad for taking the recommendation to leave them, to be honest.
The day went on just fine from there – until the hockey game this evening. A new elder care organization has put out a commercial about adult children in their new (and often unwanted) role as caregiver. This particular story featured a dad – obviously suffering from some kind of cognitive decline – trying to microwave his slippers, and then needing help just to get them on…without seeming to recognize that the person helping him is his daughter. It was really quite beautifully done, but it was so hard to watch – I was an absolute mess by the end of it.
Needless to say, I’m pretty happy for today to be over! Thinking back to that evening commercial though, I’m so glad that in mom’s case, we were spared the experience of later stages indignities and emotional turmoil that dementia can bring. But my heart just breaks for any caregiver who isn’t so lucky. This disease is so awful. I really hope that by talking about it more, we can start to make a collective difference and bring hope back to people who are just hanging on by a thread.
see how she reacts on the first day – fingers are crossed!