These days, I teach online for several for-profit universities—mostly grammar and composition. Almost as soon as I got out of the hospital this past summer, I threw myself into work. I took on extra classes, and had seven of them at one time. Now, I am back down to three, and after working ten hour days for the past two months, I can finally step back and relax a little bit.
If you had asked me before if I would be the kind of person to respond to grief through work, I would have denied it. I am not a particularly industrious person, and I have been inclined to think of myself more as the curl-up-on-the-couch kind of griever. However, I haven’t really had much to grieve up until now (which is a testament to the greatness of my life).
Now I know better—-work is easy. It’s the “what-if” game at 3:00 am which is hard. It’s the mental chess you play which always ends up at the same place, no matter how you arrange the pieces. Oh, and the anger and bitterness—don’t forget that. It is funny how prickly we can become. I joined several grief and loss boards, and the hierarchy which emerges even from tragedy is amusing in a dark and twisted way. The moms of stillbirths rank above those women who have simply miscarried. The childless and infertile women lord above the stillbirths, and the queens of tragedy and bitterness are those who are on the IVF juggernaut. Such tragedy all around.
Speaking of anger and bitterness—I read with amusement Lawrence Auster’s rancor at John Derbyshire’s recently-professed agnosticism. See here, and here, and here, and here. Goodness! I have always found strange those who insist that one cannot be truly conservative without faith. Does lack of faith obviate Natural Law, for example? And if it does, then Natural Law must perforce be false. If it does not, then can’t even a godless heathen stumble onto its truths?
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