Oh man. How do you come crawling back to a blog after an 11 month hiatus? Ideally not while dealing with personal stuff that’s affecting your mental stability. But I am and it is, so here we go! Sorry if this kind of stuff isn’t your jam. I guess this is me trying to organize the mental mess.

As my posts up to this point have suggested, we were expecting a baby in the fall of last year. Worry not. He was born with minimal complications and is healthy and happy. That alone was enough to keep me away for a long while. We took FMLA leave to spend those first few months with him at home, but new babies do not allow for many side projects such as video game blogging.

By the way, as someone with fresh memories of living with a newborn, I can’t believe any civilized country would make new parents go back to work in the first month or two of a new baby’s life. And not because those are precious moments, though they are. I would have been worthless at work in the state I was in. It was in my office’s best interests to get me the hell out of there.

I know some may argue that federal law made it so that I didn’t have to go to work, but FMLA doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get paid while you’re gone. I had enough medical leave to be gone for 12 weeks, but my wife didn’t. She had to head back early or it would’ve affected our finances. And a lot of people in this country don’t even have leave benefits. Frankly, that’s not good enough. That’s all. Soapbox over.

Anyway, once my online silence hit several months, I didn’t think it right to just come back with a typical post about what I’ve been playing. Of course, that kind of thinking helped continue the hiatus. The only thing I had written was a draft about my grandfather and what he was going through. And just when I was thinking I could finish that one, he died.

Granddad had been in the hospital with an infection that week, but none of it had been that dire. We talked on the phone. His recovery was going well. He was fine. It was such a normal, lazy Saturday. Then the first call came. “He’s starting to spiral. You need to get here fast.” We sprang into action, but twenty minutes later, another call from Mom. It was over. We hadn’t even made it out the door.

It was congestive heart failure. He’d beaten the infection and it didn’t matter. All things considered, he’d made it pretty far. 91 is pretty damn old. He wasn’t even scared as it was happening. He said so himself, and I take great comfort in that. Then again, you’re never as ready as you think you are to say goodbye.

What should have been a grieving period was instead a series of tasks. We’re a small family, and funeral arrangements had to be made and executed by only a handful of people. And we had to do our best for Grandma who was newly widowed.

We pulled it off somehow. Everything was as nice as could be. Some of us gave a few words or told funny stories, myself included. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. There was crying but also this need to stay strong and take care of things. We stayed a few more days to try to process everything, but on the drive home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of unaddressed grief was going to come bursting out at a random, unrelated moment.

Huh. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I guess I had more to write about than I thought. In the interest of keeping it brief I’m going to continue this in a later post. Nothing like being a sad sack multiple times in a row on a blog about escapism.