Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 Read How your brain copes with grief, and why it takes time to heal.

This time last year, my grandmother was in the hospital. She’d been non-responsive for several days but had just started indicating that she was aware of what was going on around her. She recovered enough to talk to my mom on the phone and to be transferred to hospice. She died on January 2. I didn’t go to her memorial service because it was in a county with a very high COVID-19 positivity rate. Not gathering with my people has delayed my grieving significantly.

Mostly, at times when I would normally call her, I forget that she died until I start working out the logistics. I wanted to invite her to watch my dissertation defense. My graduation. To call her and tell her about the postdoc.

I only called her for big things: getting engaged, being present, Christmas, her birthday. There are many granddaughters more communicative than I ever was. But I made sure she always knew about the big moments.

I have to trust that if her spirit persists in some form, she still knows about the big moments. But it’s really hard not to actually hear her talking to me about it.

It’s hard knowing I’ll never again sit in her bedroom and talk with her and my mom late into the night, or lie in bed and watch TV with her until we both fall asleep, or sit out by her pool, or insist she come to the beach. Never amble about the little neighborhood market Wal-Mart around the corner from her house with her picking out groceries, or go to the Chinese buffet with her. There are so many little mundane things that I miss.

She didn’t die of COVID-related illness, but it’s COVID that kept me from seeing her for a scheduled visit in April 2020, that kept my mom from rushing down to Florida to bring her here to visit before Christmas or to be at her bedside when she was in the hospital.

I really appreciate how this article ends by urging people to remember that those of us who have lost loved ones in the past 21 months have traded everyone’s safety for the last moments with the people we love, and that in making that trade we have shifted our own grieving processes in ways we’re still discovering.

🔖 Read if we’re all about to get Omicron, here are 5 tips from a long-hauler (via @agilelisa on Micro.blog).

This is sound advice for living with any chronic illness.

I don’t know how your December 25 is going, but my spouse gave me a Roy Kent Christmas card so mine is going very well.

I’m that annoying friend who loves Christmas way too much but, like, the exhausted goth version of her. I hope you have a good December 25, whether it has any additional significance for you or not. I wish you ease and fun and freedom from anxiety. ❤️

It’s unseasonably warm here in central NC and will be even warmer tomorrow. Many people have complained that this doesn’t feel like Christmas, but I have had many Florida Christmases, so to me it feels just right. Just before Christmas 2015 was my last Florida Christmas.

💬 “North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty 📚

Bodies donated to Western Carolina University’s forensic anthropology program end up in the John A. Williams Human Skeletal Collection and I’m not sure I can think of a better way to deal with an academic’s remains than to put them in a skeleton library.

Until now, you’ve had to have a Micro.blog account to reply to my blog posts or sometimes, when I’ve had it active, use Disqus to reply. Thanks to @sod’s plug-in, @maique’s tutorial, and @pimoore’s Tufte theme, I now have a “Reply by email” option!

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This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.

I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.

But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.

All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.

I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my finished books list.

My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book.

None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good.

I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn’t tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my Links category.

I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year.

What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?

I had assumed that since I, a 40-year-old mother of a young child, have been very into Dark Academia for more than a year, it must be over. But it looks like I was wrong.