E-mail: The Umbilical Cord of the 21st Century

My dear friend Seamus asked me, before Dad passed away, if I'd thought about how I'd feel after...(the sentence continued, as he wrote it "...he gets out of the ICU." Seamus can be SO kind.) I hadn't really thought about it and at the time, wasn't really up for doing so. Looking for work, trying to budget my dwindling savings, keeping in touch with my family, trying to salvage my relationship: those were all on the priority list.

A lot of my friends and family have noticed that I'm not humble by any means; in fact, if I could get some humility injected into me, I'd jump at the chance. I am however, quite self-deprecating and can be downright miserably hard on myself. I tend to take care of other people/things/important events in my life before thinking about taking care of myself, especially in relation to those people, things, and important events in my life. I've pushed grieving my father's death back due to massive amounts of overtime at work and attempting to generate alternate sources of income, acquiring a roommate in my (now cramped) single-bedroom apartment, focusing on the grieving of my family members, trying to help them where I can, etc.

And now it's coming back to haunt me. Specifically, over the Internet. I never realized what an umbilical cord email created until I started to forward something to my dad a few weeks ago and then stopped, realizing. Now that that's happened for about the dozenth time, it seems like the world is beginning to crash around me. I've shut down my feelings so much that they're now sick of waiting for me to be able to cope with them and are rebelling against me, legions of tear-thickened thoughts and menmories and feelings coursing through my mind and heart at all times. Not having had the opportunity to see my father much over the past few years, and the last time I saw him being only slightly before his death, email became our main form of communication. It was how we shared laughs, jokes, badly-written Republican rants and stories of our lives. It was how we knew what was going on with each other. And now I feel like I'm at one end of the modem with only a dial tone at the other end, one that won't impatiently start pulsing if I don't begin to transmit, but rather, will wait...and wait...and wait...