Bonnaroo 2018

It's Bonnaroo weekend 2018 and I'm sitting at one of my favorite spots, Stirling's Coffee House on the campus at Sewanee.  I love it up here "on the mountain," as they say.  There's just something about this place that gets to me, in a good way.

My gang is out on Tim's Ford Lake on a pontoon boat that Derek rented.  Four of our group took a pontoon boat out yesterday morning.  It was fun but I'm not much of a lake guy so I decided to sit out this morning's trip.  I got a 3 mile run in on the bike trail into town and, for now, I'm planning on enjoying some down time before I head over to "the Farm" this afternoon.

My mood past couple of days has been gloomy, to say the least.  My visit with my mom Wednesday afternoon - when, for the first time, she didn't recognize me - really shook me to my very roots.  I can't shake the feeling that my my visit with her Wednesday marked the end of what little was left our relationship as mother and son.  That realization makes me as sad, I think, as I have ever been in my life.  I feel unmoored and drifting with no way to control the boat that is my life.

At times like this, I find it hard to maintain a sense of perspective.  Everything else seems to pale in comparison to what my mom is going through and to the loss of my relationship with her.  Bonnaroo, running, work, health, friends and family.  It's all so draining.  My energy level is low.  I prefer being alone without - what - the responsibility, I guess, of communicating with others and expending the energy necessary to interact within the typical social paradigm.  That's a dense way of saying I want to be myself.

Part to it, I guess, is the feeling that none of my friends or family (outside of Tracy and Alice, of course) understand what this feels like, to lose the ballast in my life and not to be able to do anything about it.  And I can't explain it to them.  The helplessness, the overwhelming feeling of sadness, the hopelessness.  And, yes, I realize my mom has it so much worse than me, but that realization on my part somehow makes my inability to help her all the more devastating.

There are moments when I can forget.  When I'm coaching baseball, when I'm in the middle of a run or when I'm mediating a case for others at work.  I can lose myself at those times and in those situations, albeit briefly, and think about something other than my mom's deteriorating emotional and physical condition.  But always, the respite is temporary and the sadness returns like a river inexorably overflowing its banks after days of steady rain.  Always.